


Forward Unto Dawn

by Christer_Bleu



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe, Bonding, Depression, F/F, F/M, M/M, Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson - Freeform, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Platonic Life Partners, Platonic Romance, Queerplatonic Relationships, Renegade Reinterpretations AU, Seveneves - Neal Stephenson - Freeform, Worldbuilding, queerplatonic life partners
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-05-22 14:08:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 40,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6082293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Christer_Bleu/pseuds/Christer_Bleu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> It was a strange song, a song unknown to us but beautiful even as its darkest, ugliest verse. As it was sung we grew to understand slowly, as we listened closer we understood deeply and so we came to sing in unison and harmony. But as we rose our voices in song so did others and where once was a song with no flaws came discord. Many who had once sung along with the First grew despondent and their thought disturbed painting their voices in oily colors thick as blood. And yet through that noise, through that chaos the First sung on pure and bright and beautiful as ever - a vivid burning blue/green color like the tropical water oceans of garden worlds and clear as finely cut crystals. It was that song that held strong in the raging storm of the Darkest Days in the endless deafening uproar of the Cruel Ones' Song. When all hope seemed lost the First wrestled the discordant harmony away from the Cruel Ones and gave them that clear blue/green song to sing instead. And made the galaxy sing in harmony with the power the Cruel Ones had given the First long before in hopes the First would bring the Final Discord to an end.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>-A verse of the Reaper War sung by the Rachni referencing The Stargazer, 02.15.522 ARW</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Weightless Overture

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Renegade Reinterpretations](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/177952) by College Fools. 



> After the posting of Chapter 20 the tagging has changed to reflect this starting with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. The new tags will give credit to the source material certain aspects of Forward Unto Dawn has though this story happens firmly in the Mass Effect Fandom and while characters from the other stories will be mentioned none of them will appear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **  
> _YOU'RE ACTUALLY GOING TO WANT TO READ THIS!_  
>  **
> 
>  
> 
> Alright so... please don't be mad but I've been forced to take down all of Forward Unto Dawn and re-post it for reasons that I'm going to lay out for you in no uncertain terms. As of now Forward Unto Dawn's first draft is hand written in college ruled spiral notebooks, two are full though admittedly the second is emaciated and the third is getting towards half way full. The version that was initially posted to AO3 is some 30,535 words and 148,136 characters in HTML Formatting. Some 21 out of 34 written chapters were posted which all sounds well and good until I tell you I have eighty pages of story notes. 80 PAGES OF NOTES! HAND WRITTEN! FRONT AND BACK!
> 
> As I was reviewing these written notes, the rough draft of each chapter and the posted version of each chapter I realized what a huge mistake I had made rushing to get to where the story of Mass Effect begins for reasons that will remain mercurial because that's how the mind of a writer works even if they're just writing fanfiction. To fix this problem I realized that this would require asking everyone to stop at the "end" of the Weightless Arc to read another story that is some 50k words long to know what the hell is going on come the end of the Blight Arc and the beginning of the Arc that's after that Affliction. 
> 
> That's just unreasonable and the very good reasons that Braelyn and Braxton end up on the Normandy together seem to be brushed over for the sake of convenience so I came to the only conclusion that makes sense. Rewrite the damn thing. 
> 
> So here's just a few things to keep in mind this isn't a rewrite that's going to change a few things here and there, we've got entire characters that have to be retconned, and two entire story lines to add from their start to their conclusion before we even get to the part where the Normandy is remotely functional. The time skip between the first mention of the Normandy and the shakedown mission is completely being filled in. 
> 
> The good news is that you're getting more story, A LOT of more story. The bad news is that I have to write the damn thing and that's going to drive at least one of you faithfully subscribed to Forward Unto Dawn freaking insane. I apologize for that mental state that I've driven you into preemptively. I've been looking for a second job, interviewing everywhere that's going to pay me what I need to make to get the things done that I need to get done. I've been pretty busy in my actual life but I'm going to try to put up a chapter a week. 
> 
> I know that doesn't sound very impressive or enticing but the first posted chapter of the Weightless Arc was maybe 1.5k words, the rewrite is 4.2k words. These are not going to be short chapters like the first time they were posted. I have to go back and play ME1 knowing what assholes the characters are going to turn into by ME3! Which isn't so much a problem as me having to play through the Noveria mission again! I have Noveria!
> 
> Sorry, now I'm rambling. These notes are very stream of consciousness.
> 
> Um... you've also got a prequel to look forward too, Braelyn's mission on Akuze, Braden's firefight during the Skyllian Blitz and Braxton's massacre at Torfan... so there's that. There's a sequel in the works that's forming slowly but surely from the eighty pages and counting of story notes that I have about the local galaxy rebuilding itself and the fallout of Shepard's decision to take the choice of what to do with the Reapers away from everyone including just what the choice is going to be. Maybe so one or two shots on the side from a few minor characters. It's a whole damn universe that I've created in my head not just the whole Non-Traditional A/B/O Dynamics thing in a reinterpreted universe based in part on Renegade Reinterpretations by College Fool. Like, the only things that are similar between them now is the whole first contact with the Batarians and human enslavement by Batarians.
> 
> Anyway back to the point! I've taken some serious liberties with the timeline of Mass Effect including just what year the beacon is discovered on Eden Prime and when Saren comes into contact with Sovereign which can easily be explained away with the story as it was a human scientist who found Sovereign in the first place. Saren just killed him because Saren's an asshole who makes me fight him three times before he has the grace to just die after being shot in the head several times with a ridiculous shotgun capable of sniping things way outside the effective range of a normal shotgun. Don't worry we're going to bring that up in the story too.
> 
> So, onto the story.
> 
>  
> 
> **  
> _NO SERIOUSLY, YOU'RE GOING TO WANT TO READ THIS!!!_  
>  **

_Extended modified duty._

_  
_

_**Extended modified duty.** _

Those were words that had brought him no small deal of comfort or sorrow in the three years since the incident on Akuze, in his mind a cushy job on Eden Prime suited her physical well-being far better than the unpredictable chaos of the life of a combat controller though he knew well which she would have picked for herself again if given the choice. She had spurned the office, the chances for soft advancements to increasingly larger offices with increasingly larger responsibilities in a way that was far more suited to the Navy than the Marines. She was a Marine to her very core, born and bred for battle, cooped up behind a neatly impersonal desk for the rest of the career that the Systems Alliance Brass were desperately trying to bring to an abrupt end. When he looked at her now all he could see was the smallest and weakest of his two littermates, the pale runt who had been a rail thin seven year old with the endurance to run even an adult into the ground forever superimposed over reality. She’d grown into a fine young woman, strong and capable though others would see her as weak. An omega and an ethnic spacer she would never be tall as he would never be bulky though some cruel twist of genetics had left her at barely 5’2” and 90lbs. The same twist of genetics had made her highly maneuverable, capable of withstanding far more _gs_ than your average soldier, a blood and mitochondrial respiratory capacity to make a triathlete weep in jealousy, and an almost inhumanly efficient Krebs’ Cycle.

The end result was a natural born warrior that could go harder and longer than just about any other Marine who had ever lived even if she would never out bench them in the gym. It was a mind like a steel trap and impressive aim that had landed her in Special Reconnaissance to begin with, a job that had lead her naturally into the role of Combat Controller and to the N School in short order. As a Combat Controller she’d proven that there was steel of high quality in her spine, calling down orbital strikes with a twenty foot accuracy discrepancy while being shelled by Batarians in the Attican Traverse in a mission that went FUBAR from the moment that the troop transport had arrived. She had been unshakable in that moment, the edited vid of her calmly giving a Corporal back the rifle that he had dropped when a shell had hit the bunker they were holed up in with one hand while inputting the coordinates for where their orbital support should concentrate fire on her omni-tool with the other had gone viral on the extranet. It was a popular recruitment vid and what had drawn the attention of the N School as much as her skill as a communication’s specialist and sniper had, her control of the ground game made standard operating procedure during the Blitzkrieg and equal comfort in space had made her N7. But then Akuze. On her first mission out as N7 the platoon of Marines she’d been assigned to had been hit on a standard search and rescue mission to a prospective world the Terran Hegemony wanted to terraform and that had been the end.

Despite her unbelievable success against all odds, despite the fact that she’d rewritten history with her survival, they had benched her for fear of political repercussions on Earth once the population discovered that an omega was put in a situation where very few humans had ever survived. To kill a thresher maw that size usually took upwards of five platoons, two hundred soldiers, and far more M35-Mako than the three that she had had to work with on that mission. It killed forty-five soldiers on the ground and took out their reinforcements and she’d killed it, survived the devastating injuries that had killed the other four soldiers they’d pulled off that hell world in hospital, and was rewarded with a shiny medal and a desk job at a well-known punishment station. Not that Eden Prime was particularly harsh for a border station, nestled just the _safe_ side of the Attican Traverse/Terminus Systems border Eden Prime was boring. A beautiful garden world without a whole lot more to do than run endless drills and use the native flora, a species they called gas bags that mimicked fauna so closely that only rigorous scientific study confirmed that they were indeed plants, for target practice. He could see it in her eyes; hear it in her voice, her disgust for the politics that had put her there, the same politics that were pushing harder and harder for her discharge. The reasons behind their desperation were clear, logical even if one thought like a Terran and not a Martian, Arkie, Concordian or any derivative of the three major ethnic spacer nations. She was an omega and to the Terran Hegemony that mattered, a precious commodity due to her fertility, and as long as the Eighth Fleet could shelter her beyond the reach of any overture they could make to entice her to Earth and from there into the desperate breeding programs they’d begun a decade ago.

But the Terran Hegemony was the Terran Hegemony, hamstringed by ancient religious doctrines and close minded mortality at every turn while the ethnic spacer nations had no such stigma to overcome. Fertility in omega had long since become a public works project instead of a platform on which politicians ran for re-election upon, their decline slowed within the Cloud Ark and Asteroid Concordia and stopped on Mars. The project ethnic spacer nations launched a century ago recovering the numbers of a demographic that had always been significant in their populations instead of an afterthought as they were on Earth. As always with the Terran Hegemony it was a lack of forethought that plagued their politicians, an undue emphasis on the patriarchy in societies that hadn’t functioned sufficiently to see to the needs of its population a thousand years ago, let alone now. Still there was oppression, still there was hatred, still there was religious persecution, and still no government could bring an end to that violence which was characteristic of no other human nation save the Terran Hegemony. The Terran Hegemony was the dregs of all human societies, that which the ethnic spacer nations had risen above and fought free of and aspired to do better than. 

And now they wanted her, were whispering sweet words like a crèche-mate finally having worked up the courage to approach their secret crush and being accepted. The ploy was easy to see through, gain the attention and support of the most well-known omega alive to gain support for their breeding program, one which seemed very much like rape or forced impregnation with any form of genetic engineering banned. In a world where in vitro fertilization could match the recessive (oo) allosomes together producing a successful litter of omega in whatever ratio a couple wished, the simple process was why Mars now boasted the largest population of fertile male omega successfully bred without the crippling mutation that rendered them sterile. Reports went so far as to claim that the Hegemony wasn’t even bothering with the gene mapping that would determine which individuals had the mutation that negatively affected omega fertilization or even to determine which prospective sperm donors carried the recessive (o) allosome in the first place. Raising questions as to how exactly they planned to breed omega who could in turn breed more omega who could in turn breed back into their population the very unique gene variations that made an omega an omega including, but not limited to, a less aggressive, more social nature.

So they’d stuck her in a place where they knew retirement would look more and more attractive a time went on, purposefully reassigning the kind of troubled alphas who caused problems with both women and omega to Eden Prime. He knew that it irked her, the disapproving looks she received from the bigoted alphas in the chain of command and the over eager young privates questioning her authority and foolish sergeants offering a quick spar only to find themselves twisted into a pretzel on the gym mats screaming for mercy. But she enjoyed her job despite this, it was easy enough and provided the time necessary to pursue her other passion, xenobiology. In three years she had completed the last few courses necessary to complete her doctorate and submitted her dissertation to the University of Sabishii. Now all that was left was officially applying for graduation and receiving the fancy piece of paper to hang on the wall of her impersonal office. She'd enjoyed her other job, her first job, more however. And maybe it was the instinct to nurture others, maybe it was the desire to streamline a process that could do with some refinement, maybe it was the need to be around others, and maybe it was a thousand other reasons that could be attributed to her as an individual or her as an omega but office work suited the quieter part of her soul when it wasn’t howling in concert with the animal deep within for blood and fire. 

On screen her nose was wrinkled at him an expression of teasing disapproval he had once thought that he would never have the opportunity to be on the receiving end of for the rest of his life outside of memory and what few videos her had recorded of her over the years. His eyes traced over her features, trying desperately to memorize her face and ascertain whether or not something had changed since he had talked to her last night even though some part of him was laughing at how irrational this all was. She called him every night that she could and wrote to him every day, there weren’t any thresher maws on Eden Prime, no way that colonization would have _ever_ reached the stage it was if there had been any. The trice damned things would have attacked the heavy industrial equipment that had been used to build the capital and every other thing that wasn’t a prefab dropped from low orbit from the cargo holds of jump freighters well before their mother had been born. But still he looked, and found…

And found...

Those unusual eyes of hers were like his, a crystal clear emerald that belonged only to the oldest Shepard litter and their mother – the one that hadn’t been sired by Rear Admiral Upper Class Brandon Timothy Shepard but by some other nameless alpha that hadn’t stuck around long enough to see them born. On her they were charming, endearing, and guileless in a way that captured anyone who looked into them as they seemed betrayed every emotion that swirled behind them to the unwary and the well met. He knew the truth, she’d always been able to lie with her eyes and hide behind them terrible truths. Still they sparkled with amusement in a way that was entirely unique to her in all the worlds, sparkled with a light that he had thought lost on Akuze, genuine as he spoke to her now. 

And found...

She looked more like their mother with each passing year, looking more and more like what their mother would have looked like thirty years ago when she’d have been of the same age. He, himself favored their mother over whomever their father had been, clearly the male alpha offspring of Hannah Shepard and some other ethnic spacer probably Concordia born. The line of her jaw and cheek were softer, her bone structure more delicate and almost birdlike in appearance in a way that was purely omega but robust and sturdy in that way that was unique to spacers, a lithe grace more akin to the Olympic swimmers and body builders and mixed martial artists of the last millennium than the rugged contact sport like frame of root stock humans unaltered by the strict code of genetic engineering outlined by the Sol Consensus. For all that difference in figure and frame between the two of them attributed to the difference in both sex and dynamic there were unifying traits that identified them as siblings, a uniform soft maturation that could be attributed to the (o) allosome’s contribution to hormones which full effect could be seen in her and partially observed in both him and his identical twin brother: a touch of softness in the line of his own jaw and brow, thinner eyebrows, fuller lips, smaller ears, aquiline noses and similar quirks of facial expression. And things that were more unique to him and his twin that marked them as (Ao) alpha rather than (AA) alpha, shoulders a touch less broad than an (AA) alpha but full of the shape that (BA) betas never quite managed, in his hands more dexterous than the meaty paws he’d seen on many a mechanic since the beginning of his military career.

And found...

All that red hair that he had cursed himself for possessing as a teenager, that red hair that didn't belong to Rear Admiral Upper Class Brandon Timothy Shepard and marked the eldest Shepard litter as someone else’s. Rear Admiral Upper Class Brandon Timothy Shepard was ethnic spacer born, a Martian with black hair and grey eyes like an otherwise bright and sunny day overcast with rain clouds slowly moving onwards. All other Shepard litters were as dark of hair as their father, a point of contention between the whole of the family unit that hovered just below the barely cordial manner siblings born of different litters addressed one another. To all it was clear that the oldest Shepard litter hadn't been sired by Rear Admiral Brandon Timothy Shepard and he had seemed to care for the two red headed boys dropped unceremoniously into his lap though it had been the duty of every one of his true born pups to try to convince their elder half siblings otherwise. But it was hard for anyone to be cruel to an omega, the runt of a litter, who was nothing but smiles and hugs and sunshine even to the siblings who had wanted to see her treated cruelly. She was tiny and pale and perfect and everything that their mother was, everything that the Rear Admiral’s mate was, and so he had loved the little omega as dearly as he loved his own issue. Perhaps he had loved her more, the only other Omega to occupy his den.

And found...

That nothing had really changed, the voice in his head that had been whispering that throughout his inspection of his littermate preening smugly at its victory.

“Braden Allen Shepard, now you know mum would box your ears if she caught you saying something like anywhere within six au of her.” The tone was a pantomime of their others but the harshness of true reprimand was absent, a joke made of the very real threat of their mother’s retaliation to such comments about one another let alone one of their younger siblings. But that was just how litters worked, siblings born from the same litter as close as one would expect triplets, or quadruplets, to be, where siblings born of different litters may be close but were usually treated like more distant relations making family reunions interesting affairs when the youngest generations treated anyone who hadn’t shared a womb with them like second cousins.

Commander Braden Shepard laughed, a deep masculine sound of amusement that brought forth harmonizing giggles from the speakers. “But ‘Drew is a right bastard and you know it.”

It was true to some degree, his twin was his opposite in every way that a pair of identical twins could be. Braxton Andrew Shepard was a tough piece of gristle formed under the strict rule of their father. If Braden was an alpha, sociable and authoritative but fair, then Braxton was a sigma. Sigma was not a real designation just a hiccup of personality that made them both difficult and antisocial and far more aggressive than their counterparts. Aside from the permanent scowl on Braxton's face and his bad attitude they would be indistinguishable from one another at a distance. When Braxton didn’t want someone to know that there was a difference between them there wasn’t, an act that he had perfected sometime around when their young brother Gabriel had become an overbearing little shit actively seeking to torment _any_ of their sisters. Where Braden had towed the line, refusing to tell on his younger brother and taking his abuse, Braxton had begun what would later develop into a pattern of violence against assholes and abusers by ripping into Gabriel every time the boy had opened his mouth when their parents weren’t around. One would expect that after years of downright abuse Gabriel would have learned to shut his mouth or at least how to defend himself properly, and one would be wrong. It was those early days that had made Braxton more of what he was now than anything else, a tough SOB well suited to his job of quick, dirty, and loud operations in close quarters with no patience for anyone who was a bully or stylized themselves as bullies. Braxton’s jacket was full of reprimands and demerits for those acts of violence, a formality that hadn’t busted his rank and won him far more friends than Braden was willing to admit out loud.

Her head turned quickly from side to side like a teenager desperately searching for an out after misjudging a night of drunken revelry with crèche-mates and arriving home just in time for their parents to get ready to leave for work, emerald eyes sweeping the entirety of the room behind her console; shoulders rolling forward and shrinking both down and in, she made herself look as small as she could in the large leather chair as if hunching down had ever helped anyone go unnoticed in the history of humanity. As if she thought that if she shrunk enough she could hide from their mother clear across the galaxy whom, quite frankly, couldn’t possibly be aware of the content of this conversation even if she was well aware of how often her eldest children kept in contact with one another. It was some instinctual hold over from childhood, an irrational paranoia that parents could always knew what was happening that developed in the offspring of anyone who worked in any officially or unofficially sanctioned intelligence agency. 

“Oh, I know it but that doesn’t mean you come right out and say it,” the words were a hissed whisper. “Drew’s dickishness is a part of his charm, you can always count on him to say the things that you’re too polite to say but were thinking anyway. He’s a walking PR disaster.” Her posture was still submissive and even across the incredible distance that separated them Braden felt his chest begin to swell, under no circumstances would he bow up to their mother but there was no harm in making himself look bigger in this situation. It was an instinctual response that he had tried to suppress around most people he perceived as smaller than himself physically, he mostly succeeded as long as his little sister wasn’t part of the equation. Of course she’d protest greatly if she knew the logic behind his actions, her jacket had more impressive field work than he had managed even if she had been quite unceremoniously benched after one op had gone entirely too public because some now defunct company’s PR department had tried to fix the blame for a failed terraformation effort on the marines who had gone out to investigate the disappearance of the initial scientific team that had been lodged on Akuze.

“Braelyn, it’s not like mom is going to make the jump all the way to Elysium just to clip me a good one in the ear.” The look she gave him was clearly disbelieving but she humored him, she was done trying to convince him of things that weren’t true and decided to accept anything he had to say with the good natured acquiescence of an omega that didn’t seem keen to point out the ridiculousness of what they had just heard. History had shown that their mother _would_ take the time out of any shore leave she had on Elysium or wherever Braxton was bunked between duty tours on ships to clip them both a good one in the ear, close fisted with her weaker right arm –because that really mattered when you were being punched in the ear, for any perceived infraction of the rules they had had as children as if they weren’t nearing their late thirties.

“She just may.” Suddenly her voice was distant as her eyes caught the quiet alarm on the screen mounted directly into her desk, a timer he himself kept as a morbid reminded of what had happened to her, a reminder for her to get up and stretch to keep her back from locking up. The last remaining bits unpleasantness of Akuze rearing its ugly head in the light of day, a permanent reminder that she knew she would have to live with since she’d left the hospital, since completing physical therapy in Odessa on Mars.

Not for the first time Braden Allen Shepard felt impotent, sitting there in his PT clothes at the console in the tiny apartment he was renting on Elysium with sweat still drying on his skin, he didn’t feel like the marine who had done the impossible just down the street from here three and a half years ago. He felt like he was a kid again, chest and shoulders too thin and weak to push his bed away from the wall to clean underneath it let alone protect the youngest of his litter. Except this time their parents weren't around and now there was no Brandon Timothy Shepard to step in and protect her because Braden and Braxton couldn’t. They’d all failed spectacularly and in the end Braelyn had survived, if only just, returning to them a broken, hollow husk of the vibrant person she had once been lost in the depths of the blackest depression after returning home from Akuze. For months she’d languished, going through the motions of physical therapy only because it was what was expected of her, because she’d been so active before, sitting silently across from her psychologist refusing to speak on the subject of Akuze or the job that she had just lost. For a second he glimpsed it as she stood up, the matte black prosthetic that extended from just below her left knee, the leg she’d been born with crushed beyond any hope of salvage in the chaos of that second meeting with the thresher maw.

The beast now lay stuffed in the building that housed the monument to the soldiers lost on Akuze, a testament to how dangerous the creatures really were and a physical representation of the records that Braelyn now held: the most accurate orbital strike calculations made under duress, the closest orbital strike made to a living person who survived, and the largest thresher maw killed on foot by one person. The creature was coiled around the very M35-Mako that had saved his sister’s life when she called down the Hammer of God barely ten feet from where she lay trapped and provided the cover that she needed to get off the shot that had pierced its Central Nervous System analogue killing it instantly. The entire scene was poetic; a work of art commemorating the ending of two lives in two very different ways, the thresher maw had been swept into sweet oblivion in the embrace of true death while Braelyn had watched as her world fell apart around her. Braden smiled grimly, a hard display of his teeth that was more a snarl than anything else, every year it seemed that the stuffed taxidermy of the creature had more and more holes in it from vengeful soldiers and civilians alike unable to help themselves though they knew it was a hollow gesture seeking revenge for the fifty marines who had died, for the forty four empty caskets. 

To some, Braelyn’s tombstone and casket would seem like an equally hollow gesture, something some think tank or artist had come up with when designing the monument on Akuze and its twin hallowed hill on Mars for the sake of symmetry. But the medical records didn’t lie, the radical trauma induced epigenetic shift that had saved Braelyn’s life had been nothing short of the death of that particular set, three of the active genes of that set deleted the next time her cells divided. It wasn’t a figurative statement that Braelyn had been lost on that day, even if she completely recovered mentally from that trauma she would no longer be physically that same person on the most fundamental level beyond the loss of that limb.


	2. Weightless Verse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I meant to post this Wednesday of last week but my internet didn't want to cooperate and they only just got out to fix it today. It's looking like there is going to be updates to at least one of my stories on Wednesdays or Thursdays because those are the days that I'm off my full time day job. Don't hold me to that, I'll try my best to make that a reality but working two days and taking classes is really cutting into my time.

The world seemed wrong somehow since she had awoken after what could only be described as the most violent epigenetic shift of her life, fortunately through some act of instinct or proof of a benevolent high power she didn’t remember much of it. Either asleep or unconscious throughout the majority of the process she had only the aftermath and extensive pharmaceutical assistance the doctors had extended to ascertain just how severe her post-traumatic epigenetic shift was. Given exactly what they had given her for nausea and the record of the mess that was her microbiome it had been a Class 5 Shift. Contrary to popular belief epigenetic shifts on the scale that ethnic spacers were capable of weren’t quiet affairs and rated on a scale of how difficult the shift was based on how much stress was placed on the body. The scale ranged from Class 1 Shifts, which accompanied by headaches and fevers that could be taken care of at home with NSAIDS and bedrest, to Class 5 Shifts, which required hospitalization and pharmaceutical intervention to prevent the very real possibility of an extinction event of intestinal fauna necessary for digestion. Most epigenetic shifts were Class 2 or 3 Shifts accompanied by a little nausea, muscle weakness, and fever but were rarely more intense than a bought of food poisoning from a shady stall in some hop in the local system you passed through on a commercial lay over. There was a hypothetical Class 6 Shift which was theorized to be as severe as a Class 5 Shift and capable of inducing fatal mutations to an unknown number of genes that would result in failed daughter cells but given that Class 5 Shifts were always induced by traumatic stress and resulted in death without immediate medical attention the hypothetical Class 6 was just a figment in the imagination of medical thriller screen writers. 

That shift was the furthest that she’d ever shifted before, each small alteration to the configuration of her genes just that small. Like a pup playing with a set of magnetic blocks and deciding to change the color of a few of the blocks in the tower to a different color or have the OLED screens display a picture instead of a color. The Akuze Shift as she’d come to call it had changed everything and prevented any future reversion to the mean, locking away the set that she’d been born in forever. Like that same pup getting a new set of blocks rated for an older age group and constructing a more elaborate tower with rectangles, cylindrical pieces, metal balls, and circles instead of the basic squares available in their first set of blocks. She’d been subject to a gene deletion which wouldn’t have been noticed in a root stock, ethnic terran, human incapable of epigenetic shifts. While it was theoretically possible that in the right circumstances the gene sequence that allowed for easy epigenetic shifts in ethnic spacers to change the configuration of any gene for any expression possible, it was equally possible for an epigenetic shift to effectively remove someone’s ability to undergo an epigenetic shift; for the most part only a few genes changed the way they were expressed. The genes that altered in most epigenetic shifts were small unseen things like how the eye reacted to light of certain frequencies making it easier to sleep on ships or planet side or how well the body reacted to certain environmental stressors like extended periods on freefall easing the mental strain of the experience, but they were all catalogued anonymously in a public access file available to all ethnic spacers. The file was originally devised as a way for teenagers undergoing their first few epigenetic shifts to understand what was happening and become accustomed to taking a new set by anticipating just what would change as hormones ran rampant in their bodies and after reviewing that file critically she was certain that her shift was… unique.

Class 5 Shifts were always trauma induced and always resulted in what was essentially the _death_ of a person, the stress so great that the body decided it was better off without some of the genes that comprised the failed set and either deleting them or altering them so much that they were unrecognizable. It was a well-documented phenomenon but even with the help group for those who had under gone Class 5 Shifts the experience was uniquely unsettling, a dark depression that colored every aspect of the survivor’s life as they became increasingly aware of the fact that they had died. Put simply each epigenetic shift was a set and over the course of a life time an ethnic spacer who was either military or a colonist underwent, on average, over 100 epigenetic shifts but would always begin to revert to the set that they were born in if reintroduced to the environment that they were born in for a significant enough period of time. The set they were born in was their Base Set and was essentially version 1.0 with each set after that being labeled as 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, ect. Class 5 Shifts had a nasty tendency of removing some of the genes that were a part of the Base Set, without those specific genes there to be activated the body free styled and came up with version 2.0 whatever it may be. No epigenetic shift had resulted in a human who was no longer viable and would die as a result but for all intents and purposes, as version 1.0 was gone all that was left was version 2.0 perfectly aware that version 1.0 is unattainable.

No matter how progressive ethnic spacer society, how invested the Sol Consensus was with regulating genetic engineering but putting forth strict guidelines that all spacer nations had to follow from the Big Three to the fledgling colonies, there was very little in the way of help for anyone who had experienced a Class 5 Shift. The laws that the space bound nations had agreed upon when the Sol Consensus was founded limited the usage of genetic engineering, without explicit medical recommendation agreed upon by no less than twenty doctors of at least five different nations to save a life alteration to the genetic code of an adult was strictly prohibited as was tampering with the suite of genetic modification offered to any pregnant parent who was ethnically terran. The suite served as a baseline from which the line between ethnic terran and ethnic spacer was drawn though each spacer nation had its own slightly different suite that modified things that had been rigorously peer reviewed before being allowed as a part of the given nation’s suite; with the average height of Arkies, being noticeably shorter than any other ethnic spacer group due to their status as a strictly station nation and emphasis on space constraints, or the pale skin and bright eyes of the Concordia, only approved because the technology and mining equipment of the time was unreliable making instant visibility a necessity when power inevitably failed again and crew members were covered in a layer of dust so thick it was hard to see any reflective materials, as prime examples as individual exceptions. The suites were offered to everyone regardless of ethnic background, political stance, economic standing, or religious views without exception. In fact the only exception to those laws in the last three hundred years since they were enacted was the Martian Omega Breeding Program – which was a multinational project but MOBP, pronounced mop, was catchier- which had worked under extremely strict guidelines overseen by the Systems Alliance Armed Forces and peer reviewed by every facility capable of such in-depth peer review in the Sol Consensus. 

As easy as it would be to just plug those genes back into place no one was willing to risk their practice, careers, licenses or freedom to ease the suffering of some V2.0 ethnic spacers when psychologists specializing in the field existed. They were trained specifically to handle the lethargy, the depression, and the violent epigenetic shifts that followed a Stage 5 Shift and they were good at their jobs. But to Braelyn it seemed very much what she imagined the process of living as a psychopath, the knowledge that she must behave in a certain way as it was what was expected but not really understanding the motivations behind each of those actions. She was going through the motions trying to ignore the hollowness, the numbness that was always there in the bottom of her chest waiting for the right moment to rise up and drown her with the whispered half-truths of her current situation. The words that were said in the voices of the marines who had died around her at odds with reality, the line between the unpleasant things that her mind was conjuring up and the true external stimuli drawn clearly in her vision. It was one of those things that omega could do that the other dynamics, for the most part, couldn’t that had kept her sane. Her entire life Braelyn had been able to _hear_ color. Over 90% had reported some form of synesthesia over the course of their lifetime, the overlapping of senses, usually sight and sound. The human brain is an amazing organ capable of amazing things including recognizing and isolating different sounds with voices being something of a specialty. Like all sound the human vocal range is a series of notes, each note in Braelyn’s hearing range had its own unique accompanying bright splash of color, each individual note resulting in the same color each time she heard it. 

It was one those things that no one ever talked about, science only able to speculate wildly as to why omega alone would develop the tendency to experience a blending of the senses in 9 in every 10 individuals and keep it for so long. It was one of the things that she hadn’t really thought about before Akuze, just something that she could do like how some people could lick the tip of their own nose or roll their tongue while others couldn’t. Now it weighed on her, the dull humming of the air conditioning unit chugging away against the oppressive humidity that was Eden Prime in summer replacing the soothing sound of Braden’s voice. It was empty without them, her brothers, her _true_ brothers, the ones that she had been born with. But Braden didn't seem to understand, didn't seem like he'd noticed though surely he had. For all his strength he can't protect her from herself, from the dark places in her own head, from the expectations of the Systems Alliance Marines. Braden is an alpha among other alphas and betas he trusted, he has his pack and can easily find another if pressed. She's envious of him in that way and to an extent Braxton, he can find companionship among alphas if he swallows his pride or has reason to respect them. They were both able to live a life that suited them in a world that welcomed them. A world where they hadn’t **died** but been made to go on as if some fundamental part of their soul hadn’t been ripped away and discarded.

Her leg ached relentlessly. It was going to rain soon. She didn't like looking at it, the reason she was riding a desk and not out in the field, even when the sharp pulsing did its best to make itself impossible to ignore.  


The unpleasant reality was that even standing barefoot in the little cubby hold of a kitchen boxed in on all four sides the world was too large and she couldn't escape it, couldn’t escape her own mind which was screaming that she had died that day. Trapped in the overturned Mako with her lungs full of oily black smoke and her nose full of the scent blood so thick she could taste it on the back of her tongue, frantically trying to reach the control pack that had been dislodged from its place by her feet by the impact she'd been unable to escape it, trying to ignore the cruel image of a tube of toothpaste where her lower left leg had been. The pretty metal they had added to her jacket, as if she were a magpie and not a person, was an attempt to placate both her and the masses who were watching as a company signed its own death warrant. A pat on the back and the assurance that she was still a Marine even as they slapped her with a job on the island of misfit toys to placate the screaming hordes on Earth upset that an **omega** had been injured in the line of duty. As if others hadn't died, as if her _pack_ hadn't died there in the dust on Akuze or the hospital later.

The air had changed around her, suddenly there was a warmth and weight surrounding her, boxing her in and… she was trembling…

Had she been shaking?

The hands that now held hers steady were strong and almost as reassuring as the scent that broke through her stupor. Woodsy and deep and calming Braelyn allowed herself to sink into the comfort that they provided so selflessly. This was the only solace that she'd found on Eden Prime, Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams had been an essential part of her recovery, the only thing that had prevented her from eating her side arm in the earliest days here. Deemed too radical to serve anywhere where she might come into contact with aliens the xenophobic Williams had been assigned to the 2nd Frontier Division to prevent a potential galactic incident. Here if she were to run into anything intelligent that wasn't human she was expected to destroy it with extreme prejudice and that suited Williams just fine. Despite the fact that the majority of humans shared this opinion Williams was here on this rock instead of patrolling the edges of humanity's territory and that had been enough for Williams who was alpha enough to fulfill her role but submissive enough to accept that this was likely where she would be until either death or retirement - whichever came first.

Williams had found Braelyn in her moment of greatest weakness, breaking in the door to the Second Lieutenant's office to do whatever was necessary to comfort the omega, the mien that Braelyn had been exuding one that Williams had seen far too often. Eden Prime was more than just a punishment station from troubled soldiers, a safe place to put them until the front line demanded whatever psycho they’d put away in the cupboard onto the front line hoping to unleash the violence in them constructively, Eden Prime was also where they sent the worse of the cases of PTSD. A place with shrinks just about everywhere you turned both on base and off that still, somehow, boasted the highest suicide rate of any duty station including ones that were suicide just to join up with like the 1st Frontier Division balls deep in the Terminus Systems. In the end Williams’ intervention had been the start of something fundamentally primal between the two of them, something that defied the logic in a way that only the reptilian brain could, for the first time since Akuze Braelyn had bonded with someone. When Williams had moved into Braelyn's modest apartment many had made the assumption that the two were a romantically involved pair though they were wrong to think so, Williams needed someone to care for and Braelyn needed to be cared for, all of her other bonds and the comfort they offered far from her. When Braelyn had marked Williams as her own the rumors had gotten worse, the world outside these walls saw things as they wished too.

"You don't have to take them now." they both knew that was a lie, the little blue capsules in Braelyn's palm were required if she wanted to continue to be a Marine. Something that a requisition’s officer brought around in that damnable little cart every month directly to her office, smiling apologetically to her as whoever had drawn that particularly disliked duty that month. The hormone treatments that the Systems Alliance was something of a controversy, a concession that the Sol Consensus made to the Hegemony when it had refused the proposed pure alpha force that the Hegemony had brought to the table. The idea had been that removing alphas from the population to serve for the betterment of humanity would weaken the local governmental military forces when that had failed the Hegemony had pushed for a uniformity that was delivered in the form of hormones distributed to soldiers that regulated the amount of specific hormones, mainly testosterone and estrogen. At the time, two years before the official beginning of the Blitzkrieg, the Sol Consensus was willing to let the clause go but had since brought together the same minds that served on the Genetic Engineering and Manipulation Review Board to look into the horrific negative repercussions of what was effectively poisoning an astonishingly large number soldiers for years. Scuttlebutt claimed that the Hegemony had planned ahead, knowing that the hormones would poison ethnic spacers capable of epigenetic shifts every time they underwent an epigenetic shift which could be quite often depending on the circumstances an individual’s job. 

If asked Braelyn wasn’t certain that she would be able to recall how many epigenetic shifts she had underwent since enlisting not including the Category 5 Shift she’d experienced on Akuze, they were all logged in her medical records and without looking she knew that there were at least sixty on her jacket that were at least Category 3 Shifts. Since her Category 5 Shift on Akuze and the death of her first self she experienced at least four Category 1 Shifts a month, the headaches blinding together until it had become normal, the cumulative effects that the hormones were having on her body beginning to show themselves. Now each pill made her sick, the doctors trying to find a balance that didn’t twist her around and ring her out like a wet towel, even if they made the pain in her chest worse as they stole away the listlessness and lethargy and finally migraines.

Bitter and vaguely acidic the nitros dissolved on her tongue and the world tasted like plastic, as the plastic replaced the taste of rain and rich earth that came with Williams. The nitros stole such a basic part of her that it changed that ache to a sick throbbing that joined the sharp pulsing in her leg. Suddenly her head hurt and the world spun in quick wide circles. The physical effect wouldn't be immediate but the nitros were already hard at work, the nightmare that she lived spiraling further and further into madness. By morning she would be a mess but she'd find the strength to get out of bed and face the day like she had every day before for the last three years. Her hormonal balance tipped far off its natural equilibrium by a pill that both mellowed out alphas and sharpened omegas, as if anyone’s body could withstand such torment for long without rebelling. Turning fully into Williams arms Braelyn crushed herself into the larger frame, burying her face into the warm skin of the Marine's neck. Williams would hold her and they would both pretend that Braelyn wasn't crying.


	3. Weightless Verse

_Heat._ It was the first impression of anything in her mind, an all-consuming sensation that drug her from the blissful emptiness of sleep that so seldom came with such ease since Akuze. A warning sign as her body violent rebelled to what had been done to it for the sake of a society which had forbade any form of genetic engineering believing in anachronistic views of what humanity should be. Altering gene sequences a terrible thing but altering the hormones that regulated the internal function of everyone’s body to maintain an ideal standard, a baseline of (BA) beta established with the skewed population of the Hegemony in mind, whose long lasting consequences were only now coming to be understood in their entirety. Braelyn woke up hot, drowning in the inferno raging in her chest and abdomen, drowning in the nausea churning in her gut as her body attempted to realign itself to a functioning configuration in the aftermath of artificial hormones inducing an epigenetic shift that was now incompatible with her base set. That this had become a regular occurrence was a damning mark against the SAAF Policy concerning hormone treatments for its soldiers and one that it seemed many weren’t going to stand for any longer if Scuttlebutt was to be believed. In these matters, those that involved rumors of investigations launched by the Sol Consensus into some matter or another, focusing its think tank on Mars, specifically in Acheron, usually proved to be truth. Scuttlebutt was reliable in these matters in ways that he usually wasn’t in others.

What Scuttlebutt had to say on the matter was entirely inconsequential to her situation, locked as she was in the _spacer rut_ which was an altogether unhealthy and unpleasant and product of a very unbalanced physical state resulting from artificial pharmaceutical interference. Depending on who you asked, whose payroll the doctor was on, they’d tell you it was either harmless or literally shaving years off her life every time it happened. Fortunately for her, at least, she was a high profile officer, the most famous omega of the modern age, and the SAAF was invested in keeping her healthy enough for the media at the very least. The man that they had found for her was a kindly elder gentlemen with more years in practice than even her mother had been alive that specialized in ailments associated with ethnic spacers, specifically ethnic Concordians. And her VI, Arken, had already sent a message to his office with an update on her biometrics and how wildly they had fluctuated. At a quick glance she could tell just how far she had shifted from the mean by how dramatically high this curve had skewed.

_“This is my life,”_ she thought bleakly, peeling herself away from sheets gone clammy with her sweat _“This is my life Post-Akuze.”_ a shower wouldn’t fix anything but would make her feel better in a way that few other things would that didn’t require a pharmacist or doctor. She stood under the freezing spray, expecting the water to do the impossible and undo what the hormones had done to her. Unfortunately the combination of cold shower and enough coffee to drown a liberal arts college student didn’t do much more than make her feel like barely more than a lifeless, shuffling zombie. The clock blinked 0200 Zulu, three hours of sleep and she wasn’t likely to actually rest before the alarm went off at 0500. But the cold had beaten back the nausea and the heat had yet to diffuse back into the tips of her toes and fingers. Those little blue pills were working on her senses, skewing the world in strange ways that were contrary to the vivid reality that she had lived in Pre-Akuze.

_“This is my life,”_ shivering as she fished out a pair of loose shorts and a tank top, _“This is my life Post-Akuze.”_

Instead of kneeling to that weakness she turned back to her bed with a growl of disgust, she had no desire to lay there for three hours smelling her own sweat with that bitter acrid scent of medication, past experience had taught her that it only made the whole experience even more uncomfortable. Instead she stripped the bed, dropping the soiled blankets into the mesh bag she’d designated for linens, and throwing new sheets vaguely in the direction of her bunk. She’d get around to it later; the actual process of making her bed was nearly as mindless as what was going to come next. If there was anything that the SAAF had taught Braelyn it was that you slept whenever and wherever you could and if you couldn’t sleep you ate because meals came irregularly in the field. Coffee was off the table, there wasn’t much that could draw a Marine out of a dead sleep: the unbelievable satisfying sound of the AT-12 Raider or M-99 Saber signaling that whatever you hit is no longer a problem or the world itself falling apart around them in the form of either the panic alarms on a ship informing the crew that the hull had lost its battle with the vacuum and sweet, black death in the form of slow suffocation in the void as the lack of any gases anywhere in your body as pressure was equalized would kill you before the cold if only just or the a mortar shell hitting just a few hundred feet away being high on that list and tying with freshly brewed coffee. The scent of something that wasn’t EM Rations, which you couldn’t convince anyone who had ever lived off them in the field for longer than two days wasn’t like eating wet paper towels despite all evidence to the contrary, wasn’t guaranteed to wake everyone up but coffee was. The long, time honored tradition of terrestrial naval forces, beginning with wooden galleys and extending to the modern day destroyers that were more advanced tech than literally, in the literal sense and not the figurative one, anything else cruising the waters of human controlled planetary oceans and the marvels beyond the wildest imaginations of humanity’s earliest sailors that drifted on the oceans of stars, was coffee –usually good coffee but after a sixteen hour shift at battle stations with no end in sight no one was arguing with a cup of the black stuff even if it tasted like boiled socks. 

On some of the more advanced stealth vessels at humanity’s disposal that tradition had fallen out of favor of a chemical cocktail derived from what had once been a designer drug with fascinating side effects, sailors called them EBPBs (Eye Ball Pry Bar) and it amounted to military issued speed. For all that caffeine could do a little white pill could keep both the CIC and Bridge Crew both awake and hyper alert against the threat of xenocs, the most dangerous of which required less than two hours of sleep in an ES Day to operate at full efficiency. Fortunately for the galaxy Salarians were squishier than even the Asari and couldn’t take nearly the same amount of physical abuse as humans or Turians, let alone krogan. Unfortunately for the Salarians human boarding vessels didn’t necessarily have to carry over troops to kill everyone onboard or blast a hole in the ship potentially destroying valuable data. The derogatory term for Salarians were frogs or salamanders, in truth the species was a bit too close to slugs for their own good because even pups who had never seen a slug knew that if you salted a slug it died… _horribly_. While sprinkling a little NaCl on a Salarian wasn’t enough to do much more them a horrible burn the Acheron think tank had come up with a desiccant that rapidly dehydrated Salarians and reduced them to a little less than an unpleasant puddle which could be loaded onto drones which would target life support and pump the sand like substance into their oxygen recycling system which would mix it into the water supply which was separated to make the atmosphere onboard. The end result was near instant, agonizing death.

For the most part EBPBs were issued to sailors and soldiers that would stand a chance of encountering a Salarian patrol vessel or coming into contact with the Eclipse Mercenaries and everyone else got coffee. That wonderful substance that had prevented many a full timer from falling into machinery at work. That wonderful substance that Braelyn would just have to do without until her alarm went off and waking Williams wouldn’t be unnecessarily cruel even with such a magnificent peace offering. Instead bin she pulled the sausage hast brown breakfast casserole that her neighbor, a friendly older gentlemen and his wife who had adopted her and Williams as their surrogate grandchildren, had made for them from the fridge and preheated the oven. Lined up next to the breakfast casserole were about four other casseroles that Alan and Marguerite had made for the pair, remembering their own time in the SAAF when a home cooked meal was hard to come by let alone a meal that came at a regular time.

While waiting on the oven to preheat, still mired in the partial apathy that had become the daily grind, Braelyn made the conscious effort to call up the relevant articles Xenobiology, specifically Xenomicrobiology, on her omni-tool. Given access to both the Sol Consensus and Hegemony Archives there was always some new journal or article about something fascinating that someone had discovered open to peer review, some new think tank recruiting to come up with some horrific new way to kill xenocs if pressed. Judging entirely by the sheer number of think tanks, both those related and unrelated, to the subject of chemical or biological warfare against xenocs it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that no other race put forth nearly as much effort into finding uncomfortable ways to twist another species’ biology against it than humans. By all accounts the Krogan Genophage had been a measured response by the Salarians and had been used as a last resort after much debate as to whether or not such a step should be taken. The Krogan Genophage was the only example of large scale biological warfare techniques being used by one species against another species and for good reason. Not even humans would consider crippling another species’ fertility, it was far more humane to just commit xenocide than watch a sentient species, fully aware of what had happened to them, slowly decline to what was only _just_ not critical numbers. The Krogan’s plight, being brought to the edge of extinction and held their mercilessly was an all to uncomfortable reality, something that humanity had come dangerously close to.

Like every other human in the galaxy she’d grown up learning about the Dark Days of Batarian enslavement and the Blitzkrieg that had delivered them from bondage, the slavery itself hadn’t been a severe blow to humanity’s numbers. The Batarians weren’t exactly what anyone would call particularly creative and just favored the relatively simple methods of beatings and all but starving their slave work force to death to prevent them from escaping without doing very much to study how human biology worked. The general observations worked well enough: humans reproduced between three and four children at a time, multiple adults paired together in closely knit family groups, humans required clean water, humans both grew crops and kept small, domesticated animals that weren’t smart or strong enough to be a threat that would provide them all their dietary needs in habitats with soil brought with them to the planets they intended to inhabit. Baring perhaps the Asari, who would take the time to study human biology no matter how complex and confusing compared to their own, only the Salarians would bother with mapping another species’ genome. Without that making an effective biological or chemical weapon would be almost impossible on any kind of timetable regardless of the ethical and moral arguments both for and against using it.

But humans were completely unlike any other xenoc species that they had so far encountered, both the military and privately funded laboratories kept slavers on their payroll to collect xenocs for experimentation. Sure you could put boots on the ground and fight a lengthy ground offensive, the place where humans, at the time of the Blitzkrieg, shined brighter than a hypernova but saving lives and causing the most amount of physical, mental and emotional distress was the entire point. Operating under the ‘anyone but us’ mentality the Special Military Task Force A-231, code name Cerberus, had developed a weapon to be used against the Batarians, an aerosol they called Halcyon 251. Halcyon 251 had been to go too weapon during the Blitzkrieg, it worked on Batarians as both a hemotoxin and cardiotoxin in both its gaseous and liquid form while it induced swelling, rashes, flu like symptoms, diarrhea, eye problems, headaches, and in extremely rare cases death and neurological problems in humans. But then the other side effects had come to light towards the end of the Blitzkrieg and Halcyon 251 had been removed from service in favor of lead rain and shrapnel and flame and reckless hate when it had become apparent it negatively impacted male omega’s ability to reproduce healthy offspring almost entirely and hamstringed female omega’s ability to carry a litter successfully to term. In the last forty years male omega had all but disappeared, dropping the total population of omegas to less than 7% of all humans alive. No male omega meant that omega pairs weren’t naturally producing omega litters capable of breeding more omega, meaning that the overwhelming majority of all omega alive today had inherited the recessive gene from their parents and were unlikely to pass it on. In one hundred years humanity had lost 4% of its population to the effects of Halcyon 251 which was deemed an unacceptable loss, programs had been launched in an attempt to stop the decline if reversing it proved impossible with Mars’ Recovery Program proving the most successful.

The unforeseen consequences of Halcyon 251 were devastating; the social structure had all but collapsed. True packs, the ones that lasted the decades, were formed around a “dominant” omega, their mate and beta, the dominant omega would bond to other omega, their mates and betas, and children would grow their number. The more adult members of the pack the more children that pack would produce as labor could be divided more easily between more adults so more litters would be produced closer together in deference of that fact. The “dominant” omega was the lynch pin in all of that, the home maker type that attracted others who wanted to have a large home bustling with many pups underfoot. Beta or Alpha packs were statistically less stable, prone to fission/fusion shifts which could cause a pack to break apart despite how much of a home maker the core members of the pack were. The introduction of an _aberrant_ alpha, a ‘sigma’ if you would, to a pack could cause it to devolve into chaos and violence fracturing the trust required for a pack to function. Which wasn’t to say that there was something inherently wrong with alphas no matter what their mien or personality, some psychologist centuries ago had come up with the idea of sigma and it had stuck in the collective consciousness becoming almost memetic even if the dynamic classification didn’t exist in any medical text anywhere. A sigma was, simply put, an alpha with an attitude due to either aggressive tendencies or age. 

Packs could also form around a less dominant omega though the process of bonding to those who were not omega was difficult under the best of circumstances regardless of whether you were want psychology classified as a dominate or submissive omega. Bonding partially or incorrectly was equivalent of a women on birth control selecting a partner who smelled comforting subconsciously only to find that partner less appealing when getting off birth control because one of the major factors that had originally drawn her to them was the particular combination of genes that made that person smell very much like family and a mate shouldn’t smell like a close cousin. Under the best of circumstances bonding was a tedious process regardless of one’s sex or dynamic and Braelyn had not had the best of circumstances from the beginning. Her mother was an omega, a dominant omega, but her father was a beta (BA), who for very obvious reasons even if you didn’t count the months he’d been with Hannah sexually prior to her and her twin brothers being born couldn’t be her biological father. It was a source of great tension in the Shepard household, twelve Shepard pups and only one omega born in the oldest litter, the litter that had not been sired by Timothy, being the single greatest object of their father’s adoration. The pack that was **_supposed_** to be stable but by age fourteen she had felt like she was drowning on dry land every time she was with any of her siblings but her littermates, full of emotions ranging from indifference to outright hatred.

True siblings from different litters weren’t exactly known as the friendliest of people to one another but at the very least it was cordial, not so much in the Shepard house.

The uncomfortable tension of her ‘rut’ had begun to fade into a low background humming as the oven signaled that it was hot enough to slide the casserole in. All too soon the low buzzing of the alarm would call Braelyn from depths of her own mind, from the all-consuming questions and fascinations that the articles Arken had found for her that had pushed the process of pulling the casserole from the oven and getting out plates and silverware to mechanically chew what was undoubtedly a delicious meal that she’d only just remember to put into the warmer for Williams while between articles into the apathy. She’d blink surprised at how so much time had been lost in the subject of her personal pleasure before putting on the pot of coffee for a grumbling Williams who would be grateful that breakfast was taken care of. 

_“This is my life,”_ the niggling voice in the back of her head returning to whisper that black, sweet miasma. _“This is my life, Post-Akuze.”_


	4. Weightless Verse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that this took significantly longer than a week to get up online. The rewrite has been done for some time but between technical problems with my laptop that may very well be fixable but isn't necessarily something that I have time to troubleshoot right now and my day job messing up what is about two hundred checks, at last count, people quitting said job, said job having us work overtime and not paying us overtime because they want to split up the hours you work onto next pay period's check - you know what the short answer is that I've submitted a lot of documents to the Texas Labor Board and they're going to handle it because the company sure as hell isn't. So that's what's been happening on my end. The next chapter will probably be up next Wednesday and from there we'll be back to updates every Wednesday.

_“This is my life… this is my life Post-Akuze.”_ Sitting behind a desk doing the equivalent of human resources work for the people that no other punishment station or suicide mission would to take and Corporal Jeffery Maddox was the kind of man that the Brass threw into the meat grinder during Incursions into the Terminus Systems or in defense of independent colonies that were doomed to by their distance from the relative safety of the divide between the Attican Traverse and Terminus System where all of the first stage colonies founded during the First Push into the Terminus Systems were. Men like Maddox were the kind that the Hegemony frequently shipped off world, fresh out of combat school after basic training to the furthest posts in the heart of enemy territory, the SAAF didn’t have to pay pensions to the dead as cruel and callous as it seemed.

Corporal Jeffery Maddox smelled hot and aggressive, the overpowering musk made her feel like gagging. The choking thick sour taste on her tongue reminded her of the inside of her mouth after a night of drinking, like a freshman football player who thought that bathing in body spray was a substitute for soap and water. Before Maddox could enter she had opened the window and subtly cranked up the environmental controls and air scrubbers. The system was designed to vent out smoke in the case of an attack but worked equally well of pheromones put out but a man who never quite learned how to control any of his emotional tells, it made her wonder just how much she could win off him and whoever he played poker with. This experience with Maddox was not for the first time she cursed the sensitivity that came with being omega, some biological imperative that made scent the most effective means of determining who was genetically compatible to be members of her pack, but when scent could be your tell it made bluffing her way through just about any situation just a little bit easier. 

The large marine that strolled into her office knew he was a big man and moved like he was bigger than he was, an unnecessary swagger in his step that was more arrogance than the lack of any flexibility at all. Maddox was all alpha, confident in his ability to dominate any situation in any room, that he was the most dominant at all times and more capable than anyone else in the room. That mentality had gotten him kicked out of Arcturus and busted his rank from First Sergeant down to Corporal, all that potential wrapped in the hot headed package that was trying to get itself court martialed, jailed, and eventually executed when his appeals failed if. And not necessarily in that order if the SAAF couldn’t protect him from the blood thirsty lobbyists hounding every step the SAAF took if they didn’t just throw him into the meat machine that was the Terminus Systems in what everyone knew was a suicide mission except for the men who were sent out on those missions. The only reason he hadn’t been sent out on a suicide mission yet was that he had potential, a brilliant mind behind that impossibly large ego as invaluable to the SAAF. Eden Prime was Maddox’s last chance, the final kennel in the shelter that a dog could be moved to before he was euthanized. 

Eden Prime an… interesting posting known as a punishment station thought it was different things for different people. A beautiful garden world on the brink of danger with shipping lanes ripe for exploitation before regular trade could be established with the Stage 1 Colonies fringing the edges of the Terminus Systems’ unofficial border. A place where bad soldiers were put for safe keeping until they either redeemed themselves in the eyes of the Brass, proved themselves more useful as a martyr for the cause of furthering humanity, or resigned frustrated with their lot in life. A place where soldiers with great potential but glaring personal faults like ego or stupidity were placed until the issue was ironed out for better or worse. A place where injured soldiers or famous soldiers that the Brass could no longer utilize in the field were placed until they resigned, were discharged, or retired. A place where soldiers from each individual nation’s armed forces served whatever time in the SAAF necessary to qualify for whatever job they really wanted with their nation’s armed forces. A place with the best damn light roast coffee not in the gravity well and happy coffee drinkers that would gladly consume that coffee, the coffee that would eventually make Eden Prime very rich or very famous before it reached Stage 2 Colonial Status. For a man like Maddox Eden Prime must be the physical manifestation of what he imagined hell to be. And if it weren’t for the coffee, Braelyn would be inclined to agree.

Maddox loomed over her, his shoulders square, his eyes burning into her barely masking his disbelief at her casual dismissal of his attempts at a challenge. It didn’t matter that Maddox was larger, she out ranked him, had seen far more field action than he had, had an entire pot of coffee to consume in the next two hours before lunch would be served in the Officer’s Mess to keep on schedule, and was paid a not insignificant salary to deal with men and women like Maddox. Root stock Hegemony brats who hadn’t seen real violence that humans had visited upon both xenocs and each other that wasn’t sanitized by the propaganda machine that ruled the Homeworld and likely wouldn’t unless they were being deployed to planets because their ratings were abysmal in free fall for the first three or so decades in the service and no one wanted them on ships in interest of conserving space. Eventually he would get over himself and whatever assumptions he had about her either due to media coverage of what had happened on Akuze or her current job riding a desk and show her the respect her rank deserved if nothing else. If he didn’t he would just stand there until it was time for the next appointment and the military police posted down the hall would come and remove him. Which didn’t particularly matter to her.

He stood tense for a twenty minutes, a new record before grudgingly snapped a crisp salute but the scent of aggression, his attempt to force her to submit to his will had failed and he very clearly wasn’t pleased with that. Whether it was because she was a woman or an omega Braelyn wasn’t sure but there would be a note in his jacket after this. “At ease, Corporal. Sit down.”

Braelyn did not acknowledge the marine on the other side of her desk as he pulled back the chair and sat, a casual flick of her wrist pulling his jacket on the screen embedded in her desk. His jacket was the only proof that he existed anywhere, he only boasted citizenship with the Hegemony which wasn’t unusual for a man his age, barely twenty-two, in the armed service. For reasons that could only be as ethically questionable as they were morally questionable the Hegemony tied all the information concerning its SAAF troops into their jacket and didn’t store that information anywhere else, they claimed that the problem was a lack of adequate storage for such sensitive information for all of its many soldiers serving humanity. Earth had less soldiers actively serving than both the Concordia and the Cloud Ark and both nations had the same information backlogged in several different places within the Sol System hardened against any conceivable threat space could throw at them and Earth had an ocean they could put an archive beneath. Dismissively flicking through the pages displaying Jeffery Maddox’s birth certificate, high school diploma, medical history, and records for just about everything from what color underwear he wore as a boy to how often he washed his ass as a teenager she found what she was looking for, his service history. In the picture attached to his service number Maddox was a charming, fresh faced eighteen year old. All smiles and smooth ebony skin and strong jaw and laughing dark eyes, in the picture Maddox looked to be a gentle giant but the reality was shockingly disappointing as everything concerning the Homeworld and its’ relationship with every other human nation when xenocs weren’t the topic of conversation.

Officially, on paper, Maddox was a mechanic assigned to Garage B due to his experience with light infantry vehicles, in truth Garage B was as far from anything important or remotely useful. Garage B housed twenty-five M35 Mako and twelve M44 Hammerhead, both were essentially self-maintaining with what little use they got on Eden Prime. The Mako in particular hadn’t been nicknamed “LAID”, **L** ikely **A** ctually **I** n **D** estructible, by the maintenance crews assigned to it for no reason, after being thrown like a tinker toy through the air the Mako on Akuze had been back in action before Braelyn had woken up after her surgery post-Akuze. During special training on an undisclosed world one of the men assigned to the same unit Braelyn was in actually threw one down a mountain when he’d activated the belly jets at a down right unhealthy, almost vertical angle, and managed to dent the front most axle during the almost 30,500ft fall. The marines inside had been injured severely but miraculously managed to escape with their lives. But even with the bent axle the Mako could still operate just about as well, the few that had tried claimed it handled just the same and could climb impossible cliffs of sheer rock wall just the same. Needless to say that the few who tried weren’t particularly good at driving the Mako anyway, there was a reason that special certifications were needed to drive the Mako and a toddler could jump into the Hammerhead. Eden Prime lacked thresher maw entirely or opposing forces that required a SAAF response left the beta run Garage B a notoriously slow posting.

For six earth standard months Maddox had been trying to be reassigned for special training, to work the air docks or dry docks and for six ES months he had been rejected. Under normal circumstances the request would have been handled by First Lieutenant Marcus or anyone else assigned to the C(3) offices. C(3) being the operations division it was the largest and more important on the joint base and was technically in charge of plans and training. Braelyn’s job in the C(1) offices was to serve as the official liaison between the units and headquarters on Arcturus, Earth, Mars, the Cloud Ark, ect. depending on exactly which branch she was dealing with at the moment. None of that would involve trivial tasks like this, it wasn’t an entire squadron heading out to training, but somehow Maddox had intimidated, coerced, or annoyed his way into his office. The supposed reason he was here, what was written on her schedule, was his appeal for his 3rd Rifle Requalification Bar, but in reality he was here trying to go over the C(3)’s decision. Obviously the First Lieutenant knew that but Marcus wasn’t the hard ass that marines would respect, Marcus was every inch a dangerous man that wasn’t to be trifled with despite what his SAAF jacket would have you believe. A transplant from the Concordia’s Special Service doing eight years to qualify for the job he really wanted to do all that Marcus’ jacket showed was that he was a transfer with a sealed background history in interest of maintaining the privacy that the other nation’s armed forces worked under. While Marcus could bust a hard head and not expect consequences because of his rank relative to the rank of the hard head, Braelyn could tear an enlisted a new asshole on the merit of her personal service record alone without considering her rank and importance to the Brass.

While trapped on Eden Prime for an as of yet unknown amount of time compared to Marcus’ seven remaining years Braelyn had made it a personal mission to get Marcus the respect he deserved to give herself something interesting to do if nothing else. Which meant that she was calling Marcus to conference with him concerning Maddox’s jacket, of course she’d approve his 3rd Rifle Requalification Bar because he’d earned that with a good eye and exceptional aim, and Maddox’s desire to be considered for special training. Still ignoring Maddox Braelyn called up the internal communications and pinged 1stLt Marcus, patiently awaiting Marcus’ response as though she didn’t have two hundred and fifty pounds of antsy alpha standing across from her. An alpha that was trying to drown her in musk and smelled increasingly wrong, plastic and artificial somehow the longer he stood in front of her. His agitation was increasing, the air was getting heavier, the longer she ignored him and that was just another part of the reason he was in _her_ office and not the one that he was supposed to be in. The her patience far outpaced the patience of even a man like Marcus, Maddox couldn’t intimidate her or wait her out or force her hand upside his head.

Quietly Arken chirped a confirmation in her ear, that there were two MPs in full armor posted on her door, they were a successful deterrent for a marine who wanted to get violent and had a history of violence or at least that was the thought process behind it. How effective it was remained to be seen but this wasn’t the first time that she was the test dummy for an ethically questionable experiment. “Ma’am-“ all the fire in that one word, she fought not to gag as her mind began to process that sticky plastic scent. She knew what it was but-

“Maddox.” Effectively utilizing the voice of command she’d learned in officer’s school, so calm that it shocked him for a moment. That tone, quiet and not overtly forceful but dancing on the razor’s edge, didn’t release him from his silence and they both knew it.

“Ma’am, I feel-“ this time she didn’t speak, emerald eyes bore into Maddox, her posture shifting subtly to something stronger and more authoritative despite the fact that she had to look up meet his eyes even sitting. She met his earlier challenge late, after he thought the effort wasted, with all her will, all her strength bore down on Maddox focused on one point – the alpha’s pride in his dominance and supremacy over any given situation. Finding what bothered alphas most was something of a talent, exploiting that weakness a skill that she had honed over the years beginning with the birth of the second Shepard litter. Will power was the secret strength of a soldier and the manipulation of that will was what omega excelled at; sign them all up for a green ring. More sensitive to social interactions the interpretation omega were naturally more inclined to accurately discern the multiple levels of communication, decipher the information garnered from the communication, and use it to their advantage. Biologically, instinctually, and socially Maddox didn’t stand a change from the moment that he met her eyes.

In a similar situation an alpha would use aggression or the threat of aggression and violence to dominate. Alpha were known for their physical prowess, the testosterone in the veins ruling them and guiding their every action and in their own circles it worked. A beta would argue logic, quick to back down should that choice prove wise against an increasingly irrational alpha they were quick to retreat. Against beta alpha aggression was surprisingly effective. How exactly it worked, the logic that made these interactions between beta and alpha possible, escaped her entirely. The observations had been made on very young children before crèche, before they’d learned proper manners and how to behave, before their personalities had had a chance to develop and rarely could be applied to adults but on men like Maddox the text book was spot on.

What was that smell, she _knew it_ , she **knew** she knew it. 

With a look, an emphasis on persuasion or demand, honed on Braden and Braxton and their father Braelyn could talk a man down from a ledge or an alpha down from the heights of what would undoubtedly be a career ending move if he was willing to let himself be heard and thus open up conversation. Something inside of Maddox snapped, that thing that had been breaking since he’d been dropped here thirty ES months ago. _“Wait, that’s-“_

Maddox should have been on better fixers, should have been given a subdermal ring, but he wasn’t. He hadn’t been taking his meds because he was an alpha and because he was an alpha no one cared. That he was on some amphetamine, likely an EBPB from his watch last night, no one would have noticed because it wasn’t strange for anyone who was pulling the long shift of the night watch to be issued an EBPB. Maddox had been notably more aggressive recently and that’s why he’d been slapped with the watch to kill some of his energy, the eye ball pry bar amounted to military issued speed and twisted someone’s scent like a war head hard candy twisted the taste buds which would mask whatever was beneath the musk coating his skin. 

Maddox was about to make a mistake. He seemed to be waiting for something, waiting for her to scream or call for help. He made a catastrophic mistake as he vaulted her desk in a wild rush of impulse, as one palm the size of a dinner plate slammed down on the reinforced plastic Braelyn dimly noted that 1stLt Marcus had just answered. Distantly Braelyn was aware that she had begun to disassociate with the world, to retreat into that cold black place that she killed in, and that Dr. Langford would not be pleased with her for this. In that unnatural calm and oxymoronic deafening silence it was like she was submerged in water, like Maddox was moving at a tenth of the speed he should have been with the momentum he had gained. Arken put a combat program into primary, the wetware implant attached to her optical nerve displaying a comprehensive HUD overlaid in her vision with harmless impulses, originally she’d modified the generic military issued program to be useful when engaging a target at any range instead of using the simple program that made determine factors like wind speed and distance easy without large, bulky equipment when sitting in a blind without a spotter. Maddox’s angle of approach, the speed he was moving, his trajectory were as clear to her as if she was playing an ultra-realistic video game or viewing the world through the visor and shell of her armor instead of seeing it with her naked eyes.

As Maddox’s torso began to move toward the holo screen displaying the details of his jacket Braelyn’s predetermined course of action began, the red head seized the cooling mug of coffee resting beside her right hand firmly. That had been a deliberate choice and a slightly awkward one, anywhere between seventy to ninety-five percent of humans were right handed and due to the false-consensus logical fallacy Maddox had naturally assumed that she was right handed. Maddox would know the whole of the 2nd Frontier Division on sight, would assume that because he knew them that he knew everyone including small quirks like determining which hand they shot with, another logical error that Marcus had determined for her in preparation for this moment. The moment that they would put Maddox down.

There wasn’t a really good reason that she actively used her right hand at work more than her left, maybe it was because the alien species brushing shoulders with humans as the Systems Alliance spread further and further away from the gravity well were used to right handed humans or a matter of convenience as most things from the way paper was orientated to how handles were made was geared towards right handed people. There also wasn’t a good reason that she was aware that there were twelve left handed marines on the base. Who knew that the newsletters that officers sent back and forth to memorize absolutely useless facts pulled from soldiers jackets by non-confidential spider programs as a way to pass time would one day be useful and not just an entertaining thing to bring up in the mess?

Warm but not hot coffee and ceramic ships filled Maddox’s face as she casually smashed it into his nose, as well trained a soldier as he was getting hit in the nose triggered the instinctual response to blink to protect the eyes. He was reaching for her right wrist, the one that she had used to break the cup on his face, scrambling to get a hold of what he assumed was her dominant hand and put her at a disadvantage as she stood, twisting to the left to allow herself more room to do what she had to do to stop this attack with “reasonable force”. According to several very amused and one very unamused combat instructor reasonable force didn’t include jamming a pen through someone’s ear and into their brain or gouging out an eye and breaking their neck in one vicious twist. Also, putting someone into a front face lock if you didn’t intend to kill them did not generally end well for people her size against men the size of Maddox in most situations severely limiting exactly what methods she could use to bust his head.

As a base level grunt Maddox had endured punishing basic training which had involved learning SPEAR, just like everyone else. His jacket showed classes in Krav Maga and other martial arts associated with it. He should have been dangerous, to anyone else he would have been dangerous but he’d underestimated her. He’d thought that because she was a stuffy pencil pusher and that was why he was now sprawled stunned across the desk, bleeding like a stuck pig from his nose and what was probably a shallow scale wound. He’d thought that she’d crumble to his will like a beta or offer herself up as his sexual slave like the cheesy porn holos that the Hegemony alpha favored. Which was why the hammer blow to his left ear was such a surprise, he had thought that he had won before the conflict began. That her punch had nearly tore his ear off and likely had done much more damage from the cracking sound that his head had made when he’d made contact with the desk as her blow whipped his neck down and to the right surely didn’t help his astonishment. It didn’t matter how big he was, didn’t matter how well trained he was, getting hit in the square on in ear _hurts_ but she’d restrained herself. Whatever damage that Braelyn had done hadn’t been enough to kill him but may have torn his ear drum.

Arken canceled the threat analysis and combat program as Maddox went briefly limp, stunned and she twisted out of his grip and out from around her desk. If he got up again she was throwing him out of the window and would let gravity decide just what would happen when his four story fall ended and lose a bet with Marcus. Someone was shouting in the background, high and tinny like it was coming out of a speaker under the now limp, graceless form of a groaning Maddox as he struggled to reorient himself and assess exactly what had happened and where his target had gone. And someone else, the accent was the twanging echo she associated with the belt from somewhere closer. “Holy hell, LT! You blasted that guy!” the high excited crack of the younger of the two marines now standing in her doorway, weapons drawn, drew a snort of amusement from her chest.

The name stenciled into the right breast of the matte black armor he wore read **D’Silva** and without the convenience of the IFF uplink scrolling six centimeters in front of her nose on the interior of her helmet it took a moment for Braelyn to register just who exactly he was. Actually looking at the boy’s spaulders to find his rank, three diagonal white stripes, was an unwelcome change that she associated with the portion of her life that could accurately be described as Post-Akuze. The Military Police didn’t wear true combat armor when on duty, instead they wore ready suits with external identifiable markings that were used in ship evacuations or during combat scenarios by non-com ship crews in the event of explosive decompression. The suits could hold up well against small arms fire fairly well but anything bigger would get through after two or three hits and retain structural integrity in an exploding ship as long as it wasn’t punctured by burning hot slag rocketing around at a decent percentage of the speed of light.

“Mind your language, Seaman.” Her voice was calm, soft, steady. The boy paled behind the clear face plate, looking as green as it was possible for someone with as dark a skin tone as his was capable of. Maybe eighteen or nineteen and away from his parents and littermates for the first time in his life, holding a pistol that looked too big in his hands, with the standard issue rifle in his hands he’d look smaller than his rifle or maybe that was just her age showing.

“Aye, aye, Ma’am.” He stammered, hesitantly holstering his sidearm as his partner, a bear of a man named Cromwell, slapped a pair of plastic cuffs on the slumped over the now groaning Maddox’s wrists. She’d have to clean off her desk before her next meeting, disinfectant and something that would kill any potential blood borne pathogens that were not happily making themselves at home in what had been her coffee. 

“Shepard?” the soft, careful sound was all beta and could only have come from the 1stLt who was still on the line. The concern written on that round face even beneath the blood and coffee smeared over the screen was clear, neat thinning brown hair seeming to mirror his agitation at what he had just witnessed, large brown eyes near watering. While she wouldn’t exactly call Marcus a friend he was kind, friendly and a good enough partner in the gym for her injured ass to get a work out. When you went a few rounds in the boxing ring you earned the right to use someone’s first name but decorum demanded he didn’t.

“First Lieutenant, I think I’m going to take an early lunch.” With a half crazed marine attacking her as the first official meeting of the day followed by three hours of dead space she had originally intended to use to catch up on paper work would now be reallocated to sitting in some C(2)’s office eating early would be a good idea. “My coffee mug seems to have met an unfortunate fate.”

The black humor that dominated the battlefield drew a low amused chuckle from his chest. “I guess we’ll have to take a rain check on that meeting concerning Maddox.”

Braelyn shook her head hard once, “No need, he’ll find himself shipped off Eden Prime soon enough. It’s out of our hands now.” 

“I understand, I’ll inform the base commander.”


	5. Weightless Verse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I meant to post this last week but two of my closest friends got married last Saturday and the week before the run up to the wedding was really crazy hammering out the last of the rough patches and still there was madness on the day of. If it makes anyone feel nay better I have started working on something of a prequel set both before and around the time of the Akuze Incident and have an official time line that I'll get around to posting soon when I'm sure of all of the dates that I need to modify for the series to make sense.

On the official records the Systems Alliance Armed Forces had divorced Cerberus sixty years ago at the behest of the Citadel Council in an attempt on the xenoc’s behalf to keep hamstring humanity’s military strength and prolong the inevitable war of humanity against the Citadel Council –and then likely every other Non-Council Race. At time the Citadel Council hadn’t taken much time to consider the psychology of humanity and assumed that just like the Volus or Elcor humans would honor both the words and implications of the treaty that the Citadel Council had shoved down humanity’s throat in the final days of the First Push into the Terminus Systems, when a brief glance at the position of human ships indicated an all-out attack on the Turians and Asari was possible. At the time humans were baying for blood, images of the carnage everywhere in the Citadel accompanying the knowledge that if humans landed a platoon inside the Citadel C-Sec couldn’t stop them from slaughtering everyone on station. Even if the Citadel were to close its arms refusing the invaders the convenience of a berth or external hatch humans would just start blowing holes in the habitat to make their own doors. Humans were a Dark Scourge on the Ground and utterly merciless in combat, that history had shown the Citadel Council though one could argue that the Council hadn’t taken into account just how long the fervor of lashing back at their slavers would last. Humanity had honored the literal word of the treaty and amassed a fleet that could realistically challenge the Citadel Fleet and win without the use of Dreadnoughts. 

The Asari Councilor who had written the treaty must have been kicking herself for assuming, for thinking that there was no way around the stipulations on how many dreadnoughts and destroyers that humans could build regardless of if the vessel was SAAF or not. That the Asari had made a mistake, after all the Asari were the representation of all that was sophistication; the height of biological and mental achievement and humanity had been enslaved by the Batarians – clearly humans were less intelligent and wouldn’t find a way to weasel out of the terms of vaguely written but intricately worded document. Whoever had suggested to the Asari Councilor that the SAAF could not deal with the greatly misunderstood Cerberus Organization must be either the greatest double agent that humanity had among the xenophiles or a person who simply did not understand the nature of Cerberus. The Cerberus Organization was the union of three separated entities composed of many smaller companies who had come together in the fires of the Blitzkrieg, forged in that crucible into a force to be feared.

Through their combined efforts humanity had taken the fight back to the Batarian’s front door and dealt a devastating blow to the Batarian Hegemony wherever human ships landed, the end result was the near complete xenocide of the Batarians outside of their home system and the elevation of Cerberus to near mythical status in the human collective as a single unit. When spoken of Cerberus was all but deified as a single entity, a well oiled machine designed and created to serve one purpose –war. If one was being honest the organization of Cerberus was such that the powers involved in its creation should have name it Hydra instead, the collapse or destruction of one company the catalyst to the creation of two more, but the name Cerberus had been marketable enough to stick and Hydra was the name of an evil organization of what could only be described as super-nazis in a very popular comic book universe in the 20st and 21nd century. The name Hydra had been picked up briefly, unsuccessfully, by the few companies funding colonization in the Terminus Systems after the First Push but the competitive nature of the industry and general lack of cooperation had relegated Hydra to the name of the human colonial strategy rather than an independent entity.

Instead some insignificant reporter had branded the Mondragon style Organization Cerberus and the name had stuck and like the truly ancient mythological creature the organization was named after the dog had three heads, in each head a brain capable of though independent from the other, each head had its own personality and thus each head had a name: Scorpio, Neptune and Herakles. The names of each head had come well after the end of the Blitzkrieg, a think tank brought together to make the organization marketable and profitable in endeavors that didn’t involve the abuse of the implementation of Martial Law outside the Local System to harvest resources to be exchanged during regular supply drops. It was a part of history that was lesser known simply because it was boring and not because anyone in particular had felt the desire to white wash the reality of the story, beyond its violent birth the early years of Cerberus were boring to anyone who wasn’t a business or marketing major.

Each _”head”_ had begun with a single company which had brow beat its competitors into submission through whichever means they had felt necessary after the CEOs had come together in secret talks to determine what could be done about the Batarians and on which front they could make the most difference. The companies which would one day be known as Scorpio dealt with the development of arms and armor, everything from the standard issue M-5 Phalanx Hand Cannons every human police officer and Alliance Soldier was issued to that most satisfying high caliber rifle the M-99 Saber to the M-35 Mako which was indestructible in all the ways that mattered to your standard issue Onyx Series armor to environment suits to colony standard emergency environment (EE) suits. If it was developed by humans to protect the body or but a hole in something it was Scorpio’s baby with the notable exception of military infantry which was shared with Scorpio’s bigger, far more fanatical brother, Neptune. Neptune, as the name would suggest, built ships with innovations inspired by xenoc tech or some obscure 20th Century science fiction novel with a dedication that was near obsessive compulsive. At any one time Neptune was working on at least ten pieces of equipment designed to move people from Point A to Point Z, hitting every point within, as proofs of concept. Without Neptune and its contributions the human fleets would be nothing, out dated frigates running around with tech that was the equal to what the Citadel Council or any other non-Council Race could bring to bear and no more. Neptune was why the Asteroid Concordia was so powerful; the Asteroid Concordia was why Neptune could with what was essentially a black budget. And if the Asteroid Concordia was what made Neptune strong, Mars was what made the last head, Herakles, invincible.

Herakles was about soldiers and the creation of super soldiers through the creation of super humans to the galaxy at large. Herakles could be blamed entirely for the disastrous M2 Project and the success of the Martian Omega Breeding Program though genetic manipulation wasn’t exactly what Herakles should be known for. If Herakles should be known for one major contribution it should be the leaps that they had made in medical science and not just the fact that the majority of the companies involved were known for genetic tampering more than they were known for the advances in the medical field. In the last century things as simple as adhesive bandages that clung to the knees and elbows of pups with the same stubborn determination as whatever they had rolled in to stain their shirt that way no matter how hard they played but were easily removed without pulling at the skin and as complex a new surgical procedures and equipment that reduced the time spent in the table during neck or back operations by as much as an hour and got patients back up on their feet weeks faster had all come out of Herakles. If a person had a medicine cabinet they were likely to have something in it that was developed by companies associated with Herakles, everything from dental floss to baby formula to the prescription ibuprofen at the pharmacy to a litter of three healthy omega pups unhindered by a faulty gene sequence was produced by Herakles.

The Queen of Herakles, the Third Head of Cerberus, sat on the other side of her desk smelling so much like home and family and comfort that it threatened to bring tears to her eyes. Miranda Lawson was hers in the way that Ashley Williams was hers, an omega who was bonded to her in the same way that her beta was bonded to her. The depth of that bond was far greater, omega whom had voluntarily bonded with one another were as close as blood – almost as close as alphas and littermates. On paper, a phrase used a lot when Cerberus was involved, Ms. Lawson was the CEO of two powerhouse sister companies – Ashin and Carbon Silvertech. Both donated large quantities of medical goods to the SAAF and frontier colonies but that hadn’t been enough to fully recover the companies public image in the eyes of the people after the years where her father spearheaded the company. Whoever was in charge of Ms. Lawson’s public relations department deserved all kinds of respect and a raise for contriving legitimate reasons for the very approachable ‘face’ after the tyrant had been assassinated. Ms. Lawson found a reason to be in place to directly oversee the most ambitious project attempted by the medical field since the longevity drug had been developed on Mars in the early days of terraformation and the discovery of the Prothean Archive.

As an omega injured in the line of duty, the sole survivor of a tragic event that could have been avoided if the intelligence gathered by the grunts on the ground had talked to the scientists instead of transnational corporations looking to maintain stocks, then Sergeant Major Braelyn Allison Shepard had woken up from surgery an instant celebrity. As an omega trying to recover the image of two large corporations after an unhinged father, paranoid and refusing to be medicated, had run the family into the ground Miranda had been looking for a way to keep the good image of the company afloat. Someone, someone who very likely didn’t have a job anymore had done their best to keep them apart despite the media darlings that the Sol Consensus had created of the two of them. For months she and Braelyn had appeared on talk shows and on the covers of magazines independently until a nightly talk show had brought them together backstage while the host was finishing up with another pair of very different individuals. The two had hit it off instantly over, of all things, the ridiculousness of mobile communications devices and their regression in appearance to the more retro appearing cellphones of the 22nd Century and yet _another_ Batman Movie Franchise making waves in the movie industry. As if there weren’t more superheros that deserved attention, “If it’s another Joker centric saga I think I may scream.” 

By the time a rather bewildered assistant had come to inform them that they were on in five minutes they were laughing so hard they were in tears. The first time she’d really laughed since Akuze, the first time that she had laughed so hard since the shore leave in a bar with Jones before they were shipped off to their deaths. Miranda was not a woman people said she was, a cold blooded business woman with great ambitions and a plan true, but there was another side to her that much of the public didn’t see. It was something of a scandal at first, her whole public image colored unfavorably by her father and Braelyn’s image as a squeaky clean marine who had survived hell clashing on the surface. Tabloid magazines had run rampant with speculation immediately after their first outing together, decidedly not politically motivated on Miranda’s part but the beginning of some dark seed in the minds of the people who made their living by slandering others, a simple trip to the movies to catch the latest in a decidedly long line of Batman movies stretching back into the 21st Century and dinner afterwards. It had become something of a regular thing between them quickly, catching a movie or a live show somewhere to distract Braelyn from both her physical and mental therapy sessions and a well cooked meal. 

More talk shows, more interviews becoming focused on their friendship though many implied that there was something else to it, a political or sexual component. They were simply good friends that had somehow, in the minds of the more unaccepting public, entered into the single most unholy public relations campaigned through social media since the Kardashians had been a thing during the early 21st century. Within weeks the pair had been inseparable and the Systems Alliance had taken notice, using Braelyn to try to muscle more out of Anshin, and with the approval of the SAAF had come a wave of idiots on social media. The tabloids ran rampant about a possible romantic relationship between the two of them and while they were not wrong they weren’t right either. But that boiled back down to them both being omega: omega being double recessive, 4% of the population and - _it wasn’t sexual no matter what circumstantial evidence pointed to._ You couldn’t convict a criminal with circumstantial evidence so the pair had chosen to laugh away any question or comment that hinted at that. And then Jacob Taylor had become involved, Jacob who was Miranda’s beta as Jones had been Braelyn’s beta before Akuze and Williams was hers now. Jacob was a kind if too serious soul who humored the two of them at their most ridiculous, behaving like teenaged girls instead of grown woman giggling over celebrities or offering the quiet solace of a man who had seen action in the field when things had become too much for Braelyn to handle.

When someone in power took notice of the problem facing omega – the extinction of the gene – and the field of omega psychology was made readily accessible then the relationship between Braelyn and Miranda would be viewed as exactly what it was. Omega were the masters of platonic life partners but the idea that an omega could want anything more than ten kids on a ranch somewhere on the frontier and would bond with anyone but their chosen mate. These shockingly gross misunderstandings had led to a popular story that she and Miranda had eloped and were popping out babies every year on Mars – as if that wouldn’t be horribly expensive even for Miranda Lawson. And Miranda could attest to that, she and her sister were a product of something like eight biological parents. But apparently –Miranda Lawson was a special bit of controversy, a designer baby who had beat the odds and was a _dominant_ omega – or as dominant as omega got in the collective memetic consciousness of humanity. A combination of brain chemistry and personality that made her magnetic, made them extroverts, made them more comfortable around other people. Omega like Miranda were capable of having a comfortable life with a beta centralized pack without fixers.

“Please tell me that you’re here, in my office, for reasons relating to the Herakles Sect and this caught your attention in a convenience store on your way out here.” The red headed soldier behind the flimsy wooden desk was working herself into a fine rage, the hairs on her arms rising.

Intellectually Braelyn was aware that anyone who cared to look into the matter would know that the time lines did not sync up for this story to be remotely true but Khalisah Bint Sinan al-Jilani had never cared about the truth. In the last earth standard year Braelyn had been granted three weeks of shore leave which was spent on Arcturus Station, very publicly, with her mother as the second Shepard litter was sworn into the Marines. For the other forty-nine weeks she had been on Eden Prime… behind this desk… accomplishing what amounted to nothing. As the recipient of four of the highest awards the SAAF could bestow all of Braelyn’s actions were closely scrutinized and always accounted for, as a very public figure in her own right she was certain that she had a team of PR enlisted reviewing each request and each destination for her shore leaves based on the very limited and eclectic list of places she was allowed to journey too handed to her by her red faced senior officer.

Fuck Westerlund News.

“And if I just wanted to visit you?” the brunette was getting closer, swelling slightly, smelling so much better than she had any right too. Actively the brunette was trying to calm her, making the concentrated effort not to let the situation out of hand especially considering how Braelyn’s day had been so far. Despite the fact that she hadn’t been in the wrong during the incident Braelyn had ruptured Maddox’s ear drum and given him a concussion. 

“We both know why that’s just not true.” Emerald eyes closed slowly, deliberately as Braelyn tried to reign herself in. “And now we can to why you’re actually here.”

“I’ve got a job proposition for you when you are forced to retire. Specifically I’ve got a request from another company watching you ride this desk and lamenting at the waste of talent and skill.”

Forced retirement was seeming more and more like a very real possibility every time the board called her in, every time the base commander met with her, in every letter from every email from the Brass. Job offers came pouring in each day, Arken studiously replying to each that for now she was a marine and that their offers would be considered, achieving them by the likelihood of her actually looking at them or outright deleting them if the offer came from anything even remotely associated with the Hegemony. But Miranda was different, a cushy job in an office in the civilian sector suited her as well as a cushy job in an office in the military and Miranda knew that. Akuze had changed her but she was still a marine to the core, a creature of earth and fire and sand and ice and metal even on her darkest day. She wouldn’t request that Braelyn do anything with any of the companies associated excessive, as Braeyln’s defined, desk work. “I’m listening, where’s the offer from?”

“Phoenix Enterprises.” And that was wholly unexpected. “We’ll talk about it over lunch, you’re off tomorrow right?” 


	6. Weightless Verse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off I apologize for this chapter taking so long to get out but I have a good reason, I swear. My laptop has been giving me trouble, I'm not sure exactly what is wrong but I've managed to troubleshoot it but I can only get internet connection when I'm plugged into the router. Between a full time job and training for another job I haven't really had the time to sit down and fiddle with my ethernet settings to get the internet to work. I'm fairly sure that I need a new laptop at this point but I don't have the money for it so >.< what's a kid to do? 
> 
> But guess what... O.O five chapters O.O here you go

Routine physical examinations were just another part of life, something that one did annually after a certain age to ascertain whether or not they needed to modify any particular part of their life to ensure that they would live as long as they should baring external circumstances like accidents. They had been a part of her life since she was fourteen, the memory of element zero filling her lungs as some insane man thought to deliberately expose all four hundred thousand children gathered in the STARR Labs for standardized testing at the end of the school year. In that controlled, sterile environment she had been put through her paces both physically and mentally alongside her littermates and crèche, competing with them to win the miniature war games they played to determine each pup’s physical development in the year since the last testing session at the STARR Labs. That first true physical had confirmed that she would forever be sensitive to biotics, feel when someone was using them in her bones like a man with arthritis could tell when a storm was coming. Becoming a soldier hadn’t changed much about physical examinations, official evaluations to see if you were up to the minimum standard of physical conditioning that the SAAF required for your particular branch of service.

Being both physically and mentally capable of performing your dities under normal operating procedures as well as how well you functioned under stress. Like boot camp all over again complete with a Drill Sergeant screaming obscenities and relegating people to degrading nicknames. At first Braelyn hadn’t thought anything of it, just another hellish afternoon of sweating like an overweight recruit in basic as her unit was put through their paces on a specially designed course meant to test their individual faculties, how well they worked as a unit, and generally how much they could take until finally someone lost their temper and knocked the small screaming man unconscious – consequences be damned, all in the hundred percent humidity of the Eden Prime rainy season. Which was a politically correct way of saying that one hundred marines were going to be running the obstacle course from hell with a minimum of four marine squadrons armed with appropriately named “fuck you guns” taking potshots at them at every bend in the road until finally they got sick of being shot out and mobbed the men. It didn’t matter that it was just a modified paint gun if the paint wasn’t actually paint but a gel that simulated the feeling of a real gunshot.

By all accounts she had passed the field portion with flying colors, excelling despite the .94 second handicap she had received as a permanent addendum to her jacket after Akuze crossing the finish line first of her unit. All the performance scores in the world wouldn’t keep her from being benched permanently if the medical portion marked her in the red again… as it had since Akuze despite the fact that the doctors had cleared her for field duty on numerous occasions. Having a prosthetic limb didn’t automatically fail a soldier, there were far too many soldiers who had lost limbs in the service and got them replaced with the SAAF standard and returned to duty after their physical therapy was completed and the Prosthetic Competence Series was completed. Having lost her left leg from the knee down hadn’t put her at the same disadvantage as the men and women who had lost arms and had to relearn how to make their hands work properly. Walking, running, jumping, climbing, all of that came easily due to the nature of the limb she lost. Unfortunately it seemed that that wasn’t what had failed her this time according to the neatly typed piece of paper the doctors had presented her with, her copy of the blood tests they had run.

It turned out that the SAAF was actually killing her, the doctors had caught the damage before it had become irreversible but in a matter of one to three ES years it would have been entirely too late. The imminent medical discharge was something that she had been aware of, the heavy weight of the executioner’s axe on her neck didn’t seem to care whether or not she had made arrangements suitable even after the dramatic shift in politics back on the home world. It didn’t matter that there was a brighter light at the end of this tunnel, that her discharge would be an immeasurable weight removed from her shoulders. The skin on her lower belly tingled, the cold numbing sensation of that little patch working away to head off the train wreck of this cynical cyclical thought pattern before it began. It wasn’t working. 

Lying face down in the nest she and Williams had unintentionally created in their living room the energy required to get up was astronomical and unattainable. Her leg ached, her lower back ached, the entirety of her midline ached.

Mercifully the sun was setting and the faint green lighting was finally turning off slowing the approach of the migraine building at the base of her neck like a thunderstorm over the ocean observed from shore. One day on Eden Prime was only just shy of three days on Earth and naturally that played havoc on the natural human circadian rhythm, to combat this green gels were added to the fluorescent lighting and Braelyn was among the 0.5% of humans that could perceive the subtle change and suffered the migraines associated with it. Hopefully the vivid purple and orange light filtering through the opened window was a good omen; any bit of good luck would be greatly appreciated. So far today had included conference calls, Miranda, an attempted assault, three hours in the C2’s office, and the news that she was actually dying.

Disgusted and overstimulated with the mother of all migraines building to a crescendo, a tsunami roaring up from the depths to break on the shores of her consciousness, she needed a drink.

In deference to her mindset, biometric feedback from the fancy neural interface feeding information directly to her VI, there was an automated message sent to Williams every five minutes until the beta answered in a manner satisfactory to the VI’s programming. Arken, Braelyn’s personal VI, wasn’t actually intelligent but more a manner of increasingly complex systems and subroutines that analyzed all the data fed to it by all the wetware in her body and acted accordingly if very specific biological changes occurred. Twice in the last year it had actually locked her in a room and alerted the proper authorities, secretly she thought that Arken had matched her with Williams but interrogating a VI was an entirely pointless endeavor, that particular piece of software was designed to evolve to the current circumstances appropriately completely free of her tampering with it. The only person that had the power to change the parameters that the software, and thus Arken, was her personal physician who had sworn a Hippocratic Oath to do no harm and couldn’t modify Arken in such a way that he would become harmful to her directly or indirectly.

There was a subtle beeping now, the soft reminder that this position was not good for her health and not a posture that she assumed often. A growing ache in her spine, the discomfort that came with lying prone but conscious on the stomach for extended periods of time for those that didn’t sleep that way. That you shouldn’t sleep that way because it’s terrible for your spine never seemed to persuade those people to lay on their backs or curl up on their sides.

Her leg ached, her lower back ached the entirety of her midline ached. _“This is my life,”_ from down the hallway of her consciousness the effort required to make the call was immense. _“This is my life, Post-Akuze.”_ Thankfully Arken was smart enough to pick up on specific patterns of behavior and replicate them artificially within reason to a certain degree as a subroutine of the medical software embedded in him. 

Almost immediately as the cycle of endlessly dancing thoughts began again the implant imbedded in her ear gave the soft flick of a successful connection, the burnt orange glow of her omni-tool barely discernable in the swiftly darkening room. “Hi, baby. How are you?”

The words were soft, intimate, muted, spoken directly into her ear as if the speaker was curled up on the bed with her instead of an impossible distance away. Arken had set her omni-tool to _quite_ hours, dimming the light it produced, broadcasting sound through her implant instead of the speaker film located in key places around the apartment, not allowing a video connection without her express permission. It was like being a pup again and all those instincts came rushing back to the fore as if they had never been forgotten or outgrown.

The high, desperately unhappy whimper that broke from Braelyn was distracting, the sudden sound unexpected and shocking and frankly embarrassing. “Oh sweetie, it’ll be alright.”

It wouldn’t be and there was no way that the woman on the other end of the line believed that or at the very least that was what Braelyn’s mind desperately screaming. It was a hollow white lie that you told someone to make them feel better but didn’t necessarily believe yourself. It was the kind of lie that the older woman excelled at, the kind of lie that all mothers got good at some time between their first and second litters. But the words didn’t necessarily matter, Arken hadn’t called Hannah Shepard to ground her in reality, hadn’t sent ahead the results of her physical because he somehow knew that her mother would need context to the nature of the call. All Arken could do was work within a limited window with limited capabilities under very specific preset biometric parameters with access to the records of what had happened last time the parameters were satisfied.

The VI hadn’t called her mother because it was the thoughtful thing to do, hadn’t done it for any reason other than a reoccurring pattern of behavior observed and catalogued and analyzed. In a situation like this it called her closest personal contact and a strong call back from her life before Akuze. It could only replicate a pattern of behaviors that had proved successful in calming her in the past without experiencing the phenomenon first hand as a human would. For all the texts on the extranet that could attest to the calming power of a mother’s voice on her pups, a machine would never know that feeling even if it understood the science behind it.

Hannah Shepard understood the game that Braelyn had been playing, thirty years in the corp and all that Hannah had to show for it was a cushy desk job on Arcturus doing something trivial for the Navy Brass. But Hannah’s day had ended when she had gotten pregnant for the first time, the extensive treatment that Hannah had undergone to ensure her pups had been born healthy had allowed her body to recover. Hannah had given up her job for a station on Earth until her pups were school aged and had almost immediately fallen pregnant again after, field work was a distant memory of her youth. Braelyn didn’t want that opportunity, didn’t have that out. To be relegated to just a _breeder_ , just thinking the world brought bile to the back of her throat.

Accept the medical discharge or have it forced upon her, the Brass had learned that there was no ignoring the issue anymore, no putting it aside, and it wasn’t as if Braelyn was pregnant and the whole matter could be swept under the rug as she would no long be required to take the suppressants until the pups were delivered and weened, her body would wick all those toxins out in the first few weeks of gestation. Then they would do what they did to her mother and she would be slammed with a permanent desk job until retirement was forced on her. Fathers weren’t as highly valued by the Brass unless they were single parents, the sheer number of new recruits allowing mothers and single fathers to do things that would allow them time with their pups in the afternoons and be transferred to reserves if war broke out. “If you start scheduling dialysis now you might get another year and a half still in.”

Of time in the service?

Of grace wherein she _**might**_ be cleared for field work again?

Another year and a half before her liver was in such a horrid state that she’d have to have a large chunk removed assuming that she still had both kidneys. Hormone treatments were notorious for their detrimental long term effects, combined with the anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications the over-all damage had put her body through the ringer. There was a reason that you could change genders but not dynamics, altering sex hormones was far safer and far more successful than attempting to alter the ratios of –

“-one or the other and it wouldn’t be so bad, everyone knows it and they still continue this barbaric practice. You could always just –“ she had she stopped paying attention? How long had her mother been talking without her realizing? It wasn’t as if the topic of conversation was necessarily important but- a swirl of colors before her eyes, dancing faeries of odd light when she squeezed them shut. “Braelyn, baby, say something. How do you feel?”

“Hurts.” The word was squeezed tight, her eyes were closed but the lids still felt like they were lowering, the deep vacuum sucking her down, the universe swallowing her whole, the small mercy that she could embrace or shun and suffer the consequences.

“What hurts?”

Her leg ached, her back ached, the entirety of her midline ached, the storm was rising slowly up her neck like a vile warmth spreading out to her fingertips. Her mother would know that and that wasn’t what Hannah had asked.

“Leg.” Because her leg was a problem, the pain was real even if there hadn’t been flesh and blood attached to the end of her left thigh for the last three years. She’d woken up without it onboard the SSV Hurricane, the agony of those frantic moments after Braelyn had called down the Hammer of God directly on her head a distant echo of a dream that haunted her to this day and would until she died.

The prosthesis was a high end piece of work, a permanent attachment that functioned exactly like her leg before Akuze. Stem cells had regrown the ends of nerves affixed to the plate that separated flesh from mechanics, the nerve impulses were translated directly into the prosthesis and generated movement exactly as if her flesh hadn’t been so clinically and coldly removed. It was standard equipment for SAAF grunts, a highly functional model that wasn’t the finest or most ridiculous available but stood up to the rigors of both battle and daily life quite well. But the leg wasn’t hers and somehow, even though her nerves were connected to metal alloy, her leg felt like it had been broken.

Not broken.

**Crushed**

The distant memories of when it had been crushed. If it hadn’t been crushed from the knee down they wouldn’t have had a reason to remove it. Braelyn was certain it hadn’t been attached before she had lost consciousness and baring traumatic avulsion or crushing injury limbs were salvaged in their entirety. But stem cells and cloning would only get you so far, bone marrow was still lethal in the blood stream, bone fragments too unpredictable...

The storm had moved up now, a roiling mass of white hot fire at the base of her skull. Lightning bolts of pain crashing into the crown of her skull now.

Her mother was doing something, something quiet and electronic that she would have missed if everything that Hannah was doing wasn’t vibrating the tiny bones in Braelyn’s ear directly. The reproduction of sound with the absence of sound had been revolutionary, quiet orders and conversations could be delivered in a language the Batarians had never taken the time to learn in a way that they wouldn’t think to detect. Whatever the original use for the technology might have been right now it was translating the words of a mother directly into the ear of a distressed pup from entire systems away.

“Like before?” Why pay someone like Dr.Langford when all you needed was for your mother to coerce you into spilling your darkest secrets, to saying things you wouldn’t say to anyone else?

The room was darker and colder now, the shades drawn tight over the windows as Arken detected the change and adjusted the temperature accordingly. The light of her omni-tool darkening to a charcoal so dark it stood out only vaguely around the edges – a detail she would be grateful for in a matter of moments if history proved as great a teacher as many claimed. As if Hannah could see her face, “Of course not. Is Ashley going to be home soon?”

The volume dipped so much that for a heart stopping moment Braelyn thought that they had been disconnected until she heard it. On the other end of the line her mother had started purring, a paler miasma rising like warm water in a sink deep in her chest. The memories of being small, of truly being the runt of the little separated from her littermates for the first time by an inexperienced father who hadn’t known any better as a member of a litter of two identical twin boys. Litters did not separate until puberty, a natural shift made within the litter itself into two distinct but unified houses: male and female. Her brothers had had each other, were alphas and not as strongly connected to one another as she was to both of them, and all she had had was their mother soothing her irrational fears. Hannah running fingers through her hair, giving every character in a long list of books their own distinctive voices until Braelyn had fallen asleep curled up tightly to her side.

As if on cue the door opened almost silently, the whisper of particle board over synthetic carpet fibers louder than it should have been. The scent of her beta immediately suffused the room, replacing the distant scent left this morning with the vibrancy that only came from a living scent – from someone nearby. “Here.”

The smell of a distressed omega would have drawn Williams to her even without the constant messages; it would entice the marine into curling up tightly against Braelyn’s back to soothe away the dark thoughts and ease her through the migraine. That those dark thoughts had almost stolen her away before, that it was before they had bonded didn’t matter to the beta… that it was the beginning of their bonding didn’t matter to the beta. All that Braelyn knew was that she was compatible with Williams, from the beginning the MP smelled like pack and that was all either of them needed to justify their relationship.

“She’s home?” the gasp of relief that escaped Braelyn was proof enough for Hannah, “I’ll let you go now. I love you.” Williams had settled behind her like a solid wall of warmth, strong fingers pressing with authority into the nape of Braelyn’s neck and shoulders. The pressure was sweet ecstasy, easing the tension in her body that she hadn’t known was there.

The blackness was sucking her back down. The report would be on the counter, the results of the mandatory work up that came after any incident between soldiers damning. The pressure to resign mounting, the medical discharge looming closer and the evidence supporting the soundness of that decision increasing. Williams would want to talk about it, pressing to make the choice to resign and go-

Where?

To Braden on Elysium?

To Braxton on Terra Nova?

To their mother on Arcturus?

To Earth?

To Miranda?

To Mars?

What would she do after she decided?

Her kidneys weren’t doing well, depending on the severity of the damage and whether or not it could be reversed would limit her options if she took the discharge or resigned today. She could make the jump out to the Jupiter Net Colonies and teach up incoming scout snipers how to handle themselves on the hellish worlds they would encounter as a civilian contact. She could take a job with Miranda, she could take the job that Phoenix Enterprises had extended to her through Miranda. All she could get out of Miranda was that job would be extensive and required her to relocate on Ontarom. Whatever it was would be big and exciting and would involve more close contact with Miranda than Braelyn was willing to commit to.

When they forced Braelyn to resign or dispense a medical discharge what would she actually do? Would the SAAF slap her with a job on Earth as a politician, something to wave in front of the noses of humanity like a carrot? It was the most common outcome if she decided to stick with the SAAF. But she had taken precautions that would allow her to circumvent that gracefully, legally, but the field of jobs it would open for her was astonishingly vast.

And this was her life, Post-Akuze. 

The final stage of her life Post-Akuze was beginning.

It could end here if she accepted her fate and made that new, impossible choice and recreated her life in all new ways.

It would have to be Mars then, she would leave this all behind for what Mars had to offer her through Phoenix Enterprises. Quietly she queued up the passenger transportation lanes looking for a ship that would take her from Arcturus to Ontarom and later, from there Mars.


	7. Weightless Bridge

Unrestricted access to SAAF personnel files was something of a scandal and something that would not be tolerated if they were caught hacking into the main database on LUNA ONE but she didn’t hand select Dylan Clevan and Freddi Denaird just for their 51 Class 5 Certifications. The pair were digital ghosts, set to work onboard Project Hummingbird’s Flag Ship in the Z Slot, backs of all trades and masters of more than a fair few. Including, it seemed, getting into restricted SAAF files without being noticed though the hole that they planned to blow in the side of the mainframe on their way out, releasing classified information to every legitimate news source in Human Controlled Territory, was nothing short of impressive. The way that Clevan had described it was simply showing her what happened to a pressurized capsule during explosive decompression, a pin prick sized hole and internal contact that they wouldn’t name would get them in and the equivalent of a grenade going off would let them out without implicating their contact in any way. How easily they got in was nothing short of impressive, how far Phoenix Enterprises reached was nothing short of mesmerizing the deeper she dived into Project Hummingbird. 

Clevan was a small man –maybe- who invoked the image of the offspring of omega and (Bo) betas. Small frame, beardless, sharp green eyes and dark red hair cut in a short undercut with a medium length curly faux hawk that lay limply over the left side of his head after fourteen hours staring at what appeared to her as a stream of incomprehensible data. Clevan, like Denaird, were M2. A Martian exception to the laws concerning genetic manipulation established by the first Sol Consensus, their sub-species created accidently in the early days of the Martian Omega Recovery Programs. The end result had been a first generation of fifty-seven (Bo) betas born from omegas with a spliced B chromosome and artificial X and Y chromosomes they called W and U respectively in hopes that the artificial sex chromosome would not produce the same issues with fertility later in life. The idea was to repair the damage to omega fertility by eliminating the problem entirely with artificial chromosomes.

Mars had succeeded in repairing the genes and producing second generation omega litters completely unaffected by the Halcyon 251 detriment to fertility, and in the process created cyclical hermaphrodites who changed sex in the presence of a certain balance of estrogen and testosterone. Despite the hormonally triggered changes M2s produced more M2s regardless of the other parent resulting in children like Clevan and Denaird. The program had been scrapped and the M2s became just another facet of Spacers, what data the team had collected applied to the eventually successful projects which had restored omega in Spacer populations. Without the failed program there would be no Clevan and Denaird to hire straight out of their primary schooling, no promise of free education anywhere they wanted to entice them in, no frighteningly efficient hackers copying everything the SAAF had along side the millions of personnel files. 

“Got it.” Denaird announced, three days of black stubble on his cheeks standing out in the harsh light of the wall mounted screen as it came to life with the actual information that Miranda had requested, Braelyn’s jacket. Were Braelyn not the paragon of humanity she was everything would be scrubbed and sanitized but there were ways around that. But the file Miranda had received had come directly from the office of Admiral Clark Hughes himself and half of her wanted to turn the frigate around and return to Eden Prime citing missing cargo in the missive she’d have to turn into the Admiral of the Eighth Fleet when she failed to arrive on Ontarom on time and steal Braelyn away. Of course he would see through that pale disguise, he had sent her after this in the first place. The medical record that very blatantly told the story of the damage that SAAF standard hormones did over time to omega, hormones only standard because of the Hegemony.

It was a brilliant plan or would have been if Mars weren’t the safer and more logical alternative than returning to the home world, start the Omega Recovery Movement providing free clinics to omega in need and quickly insure that there would be omega in need by creating a hormonal imbalance in every omega who joined the SAAF. It must not have been working well enough to please the mad men behind the scheme if Ashin had been contacted with a proposition by the SAAF to manufacture the hormones with these specifications, the name of her contact none other than Admiral Clark Hughes himself. The wily old alpha the perfect choice to reign in an outspoken omega such as herself, dominate and intimidating and mated to a meek omega who seemed to have no will of her own. Son of an omega who had lost her mate to war, mated to a meek omega who had him wrapped around her baby finger and father of two omega who he had kept _very_ far away from both the Hegemony and the SAAF.

Admiral Hughes may have appeared on the surface to be as much against omega serving in any capacity beyond what they had before WWII began in the late 1930s but he had attended university to be an actor and won several awards for his stage work before circumstance had seen him drafted into the SAAF in preparation for the First Push Into the Terminus Systems. He had carefully cultivated a black network of civilian contacts that he had been steadily feeding information to indirectly for more than half a century and the missive that he had sent her concerning the change in hormones that the Hegemony had forced through was a message, look at what they wanted her to make and be complicit in. He’d all but said get yourboys on it and make the Local System aware of what Series 3 Hormones were doing to omega. Root up the truth.

The compiled information that Denaird and Clevan had recovered was dense, nearly fifteen yodibytes of data on every omega who had ever served the SAAF encrypted with the exuberance of pups allowed to decorate a Christmas tree by themselves for the first time. The changing political climate on the home world had all but forced Admiral Hughes’ hand, the hands of all likeminded men and women. Already she had taken precautions, moving any omega employees of Ashin and Carbon Silvertech from Earth to the company headquarters in Sheffield or into the net colonies. Contrary to all the opinions passed off as science fact it seemed as if the truth would be asserted again for the first time in centuries.

A blur of motion in the corner of her eye, dark hands stained with the blood of countless enemies were so gentle as they took the data pad from her hands. It was past time for her to stop working on this project in particular, there was nothing that could be done with what was sitting before her in its current state. She knew that but sometimes it was hard to stop.

Somehow, somewhere along the way she had collected this man in the same vein that she had collected Braelyn. Jacob Taylor had been a deliberate choice, a disgraced SAAF officer who had been dishonorably discharged for a series of misdeeds culminating in the assault of a superior officer for all the right reasons. The only reason that he had escaped jail time was due to the Third Fleet’s lack of certified drone technicians demanding his reassignment from the Fourth. That action had required a very specific work visa allowing Jacob to work in the sovereign territory of another government and since the justification for his actions were not a indicative of a criminal act on the Cloud Ark he had been acquitted and dishonorably discharged instead. Jacob had spent a total of three days in Sheffield before being invited to join her for a business lunch during which he had become her body guard and the officiate of her living will on Earth.

Overturning Henry Lawson as he lorded over Carbon Silvertech from his throne on Earth would have been impossible without the beta serving as her official before Terran courts. As a general rule since it had become known that omegas were effectively going extinct, like the trait for six digits on each hand and foot, Earth had done its best to _protect_ its omega by essentially declaring them incompetent. To the galaxy at large this seemed like a sound idea but there was a reason that many Terran colonies chose to band together and form their own central governments with the aid of Mars or the Cloud Ark instead of remaining subservient to the archaic thinking of the home world. That was what Earth was quickly becoming _the home world_ , with all the reverence and spite and hatred the connotation that brought with it.

More and more the Systems Alliance was earning its name as the years churned endlessly onward, scientists and philosophers gathering their supporters and striking outwards to forge themselves a place in the universe that was unique to them. Recreating the old world in all new ways, the areophany had become less and less of a religion or idea and just the way that things were done now. All of this would not have been possible without Mars, without them paving the way forward and changing the memetic destiny of humanity as a whole. 

“She didn’t accept your offer.” It wasn’t a question; Jacob rarely asked Miranda questions concerning their resilient pack mate anymore, they both knew Braelyn well enough that she wouldn’t be able to accept any job offer that Miranda had for her. “You know what you have to do with this.”

He didn’t have to specify exactly what _this_ meant, the compiled data needed to find a home in the proper place. “I know. Clevan, Denaird, wait six hours and blow a hole in this.” It would give Jacob the time he needed for his contacts to start assaulting every SAAF mainframe that they could, drawing attention away from the personnel files, and for Acheron labs to receive the whole of the compressed file. Organized assaults like this weren’t entirely uncommon, a team of highly skilled hackers reaching out through the digital to other like minded groups to create a diversion long enough to go after what the target really was.

Miranda would have to send the data to Acheron, the genius medical teams that made their home in that city would be able to analyze it and accurately surmise exactly what it meant and would mean faster than she herself could but that would take time. The communications moved faster than the extranet, somehow the nodes system wasn’t as efficient as if in defiance of the major upgrades made in the last few years as colonization on the fringes, Tier Four Space, boomed. 

There was a movement to use modified communications nodes to expand the extranet but they were unlikely to make any progress. In the earliest days of the Systems Alliance, when all of humanity had been forced to come to some kind of accord that would allow them to push back the _devil bats_ the impossibility of human spoken language had been an advantage. There was no real way to translate exactly what humans were saying to any of the seven Galactic Languages. Full of metaphor and simile in direct defiance of the rigid order of any of the Galactic Languages no tongue humans spoke naturally could be translated into anything more than gibberish mangled in a madlib. You could play telephone in any of the seven standard Galactic Languages established by the asari all day and never have a mistranslation of the original message.

No so much with human language.

In crèche by the time whatever simple sentence was written on a little slip of paper handed to the first pup in the circle would be horribly twisted by the time it had gotten to the third pup, whose job it had been to translate it into either Russian or Japanese, by the end of the game even the teachers would be reduced to helpless giggles when the original sentence was read out loud. In one memorable instance Miranda had started the game with ‘the sky is red’ and ended it with ‘pickles and feet are delicious’ and they had only used twelve of the over twelve thousand and counting distinct languages. It was no wonder that all the money and development time possible was spent on increasing verbal communication when your average _uneducated_ Terran spoke five languages and your average Arkie spoke upwards of thirty.

With a dismissive gesture Miranda instructed her VI to translate the information as carefully as it could into Acheronic Russian and send it through the encrypted company network to her office on Mars as quickly as it could. The time until completion of task was five hours and fifty-seven minutes, it was good to know that despite civilized behavior and ideas falling to pieces around her ears her ability to estimate computer cycles and time remained spot on.


	8. Weightless Bridge

At first, with her omega cradled securely in her arms, Ashley had thought that the endless restlessness that had seeped into her bones would abate and allow her to rest for a time but the unreachable itch beneath her skin continued to test her self-control. There was nothing more that she would like to do than attack the source of it until the skin on her upper back was torn, blood staining the muted greys and blues of her bedding, but that would prove a useless and painful endeavor. The cause was purely psychological; that deep niggling sensations of wrongness in her gut that was birthed from her own uselessness and inability to solve such a simple problem.

Being a beta was easy; the fission fusion nature of pack assembly in the SAAF suited her in a way that she hadn’t expected. Packs were formed spontaneously regardless of the nature and temperament of the individuals involved and the impermanence of them inspired a desire to create meaningful bonds quickly through emotionally intense situations that wouldn’t leave anyone bleeding when a pack mate was re-stationed elsewhere. It wasn’t as if that individual was dead, it wasn’t as if what bound them together was as strong as what bound together littermates. There were very few people that Ashley had served with that she kept in constant contact with like she did her sisters.

Very early in her relationship with Braelyn she realized that bonding to an omega was unlike anything she had experienced before even after pulling a member of her squad out of the fire early in her career. It was like her litter suddenly had another member that she’d been missing her entire life, as if her mother had given birth to four children instead of just three. The difference was shocking and clearly affected them both in strange new ways that were unique unto themselves and like anyone experiencing something for the first time and looking for explanations she’d thrown herself into the tempest of the extranet searching for anything that would prove useful.

As it turned out there was a lot about omega that was unique unto themselves and not immediately intuitive to the casual observer. Sure health and first aid classes covered some of what to expect but the general theme was basic skills that could be applied to anyone in a pinch and sex ed had only covered the differences between male and female. Ashley knew more about the physiological differences between men and women than she did about alphas, betas, and omegas. You would think that you’d pick up on the fact that omegas were something like 90% more likely to be ambidextrous in thirty years.

Some of the things that had come up on the first few searches had been nothing short of mind boggling, things that seemed to be neigh impossible until she’d started _really_ paying attention. The whole supertaster thing had been pretty much a given, taste and smell was intrinsically linked in a way that was apparent to anyone who had ever been congested while eating – simply put nothing tasted right with the exception of purple Gatorade. Braelyn’s sense of smell was better than anything she had ever even heard of, the omega was capable of discerning emotional state with an astonishing degree of accuracy just from the way people smelled. One too many musicals had proven that her omega’s vocal range extended far further than she had expected for someone her size and a casual comment on how green a new lightbulb made a room on its standard setting put the redhead firmly in the category of a possible tetrachromat. Months of careful study had revealed that while Braelyn had a better sense of balance, which rightfully could be contributed to a shorter stature and thus a lower center of gravity, she wasn’t as sensitive to changes in temperature and had a much lower tolerance for pain. These were small things that had originally seemed inconsequential until Ashley had really started looking for them, paying attention, started doing the research and some of what she had found seemed backwards.

Nothing was more evident of this than the field of omega psychology and the historical treatment of omegas. In the past they were disenfranchised for being too sensitive, too selectively social, too prone to things like clinical depression to be trusted to make rational decisions for themselves. Relegated to rearing pups until WWI when the war demanded more soldiers to grind into a fine paste over the European countryside, alphas and betas had died by the thousands in the trenches and omegas were grudgingly allowed in the workplace where they had excelled just as well as the traditional bread winners. Following WWII the omega population was booming, the stereotypes had been challenged and unfair laws overturned evening the playing field globally for the first time. And then had come the Batarians and the drastic measures taken to subdue them had devastated the omega population. The Sol Consensus had responded by limiting the number of omega allowed to join any military force and take jobs that had hazard pay, the Hegemony had all but declared them incompetent again and required them to have a beta or alpha serve as their legal advocate in all things. All of this friction down the gravity well caused by something so small.

The mutation of one seemingly insignificant gene, OCA2 - which only provided the instruction to make up one protein in melanocytes that produced melanin- had sealed the fate of omega. At first it seemed negligible, there would be less children born with darker eyes, hair and skin and that had been deemed an acceptable sacrifice until natural selection had bred the defect out. Until the mutated OCA2 was discovered to be linked to the lack of healthy male omega, somehow when coupled with the Omega SRY gene it prevented the formation of viable embryo. In effect it made male omega reproductively sterile even if they were otherwise healthy individuals. Omega pairs were quickly becoming something of a myth, like megalodon surviving in Earth’s oceans into the 21st century, due to the lack of pure omega offspring. The trait was double recessive while both alpha and beta were codominant.

Omega had become few and far between to the point that the remnants of the political movement that had disenfranchised omega centuries ago had been rekindled and was quickly gaining momentum, they were calling themselves the Omega Recovery Movement. They ORM wanted to round up all the remaining omega and breed them together to somehow get more omega. Mercifully scientifically liberal Mars had explained that the endeavor was both expensive and ultimately fruitless, despite the dramatically reduced population performing the necessary gene therapy on an estimated 19 trillion individuals was highly impractical. And even then only specialized pre-natal care allowed female omega to carry a litter safely for long enough for pups to be delivered and even then most litters were delivered prematurely to spare the mother’s health. Even then the rate of miscarriage was so frighteningly high, the fertility rate markedly low. Mars only really had success in recovering its omega population due to their unabashed use of genetic engineering to produce ‘designer babies’ with beta surrogate mothers and all of the pups born through the use of that process were female chimeras possessing two distinct sets of DNA.

Strange, ethically questionable Mars was fostering the true recovery of omega with each new successive omega capable of producing gametes from two distinct genetic codes, four possibilities.

God bless them.

Tucking Braelyn closer to her chest Ashley began the long process of catching up on all the news her VI gathered for her during the course of the day, allowing herself a moment to fantasize about a possible future as the program arranged the articles in a way that she would find pleasing based on past searches. The fantasy was almost always the same, about a house on the shores of the great Martian ocean. A house filled with laughter and more pups than she bothered trying to count their little bodies rolling around on a pale purple lawn as parents, surrogate or otherwise, watched on with smiles of encouragement. It was a home of multiple mates, a large pack, many eyes watching each successive litter grow into adulthood with an equal amount of exasperation and pride and more than enough wrong names being used to address the pups to go around. The idyllic childhood she had lived reimagined away from prefabs on a world where pup would be judged on their own merits rather than a system designed to favor some genetic traits over others.

As the faint light of her omni-tool filled the air above the bed with the first article her VI had deemed _important_ Braelyn pressed her face firmly into the swell of Ashley’s bicep. It was a transcript of a recent statement made by Erwin Clayborne, acting president of Mars, marked red as urgent. The text automatically scrolled down to where her VI had highlighted were her interest would lie.

> _[... these “social warriors” are fascist sexists calling upon laws cast down due to the discrimination they perpetuated. Discrimination on the basis of pseudo-scientific reasoning made by men in the ages before regular bathing was common practice and doctors were butchers. Should Terran law makers even consider giving these sub-human creatures the time of day any longer we will open our borders to every alpha, beta, omega, and transitional who requests asylum. Each will be granted full citizenship and the privileges and immunities that come with it. Each will find themselves under the full protection of the Martian Armed Forces. Each and every sailor, marine, rifleman, peacemaker, scout and technician will give their lives to see them free of this tyranny if that is the price that justice and equality demand…_

A quick scan of the article revealed a passionate man who men every word and implication of the statement and there was no doubt that in Ashley’s mind the Clayborne would be the first man to throw himself into the fire if that is what it came to. People were already rallying to his cause, Foreman Prime Va’Lari of the Asteroid Concordia had expressed similar concerns and had made the same offer albeit without the threat of war. Insofar there had been no word from Councilman Kubler-Ross but then the Cloud Ark was quiet about their internal affairs, but then the Kupiter Belt was so far away from the gravity well that the arkies had developed the habit of doing things would much ceremony or announcement. Smaller independent nations were either silent or throwing their support behind stronger allies with a stake in the fleets.

Three more articles in revealed the reason behind Clayborne’s statement. The Earth Firsters and Terra Firma Parties were throwing their support behind the Omega Recovery Movement and as a direct result things were starting to get violent. If humanity was drawing lines in the sand it was looking like the First and Third Fleet were going to be meeting the Second, Fifth and Seventh in all-out war if there wasn't a peaceful solution to be found. Foreman Prime Va’Lari may not be willing to make the same bold statements as Clayborne but Mars and the asteroid belt had been allies since the days when both had earned their freedom in the First Colonial Revolution in 2094. One never moved without the other, like binary stars they were.

At the end of all the politics there was a light at the end of the tunnel, peaceful resolution would be coming soon. Humanity couldn’t afford to look weak in front of the Citadel Council, that humans didn’t have a single central ruling body was already a mark against them and while the Batarians had no friends there were a great number of sentients looking for a way to nullify the threat that humans potentially could be again. The Salarians had already tried to gain a foothold, a grip on the scruff of humanity’s neck like they had the Krogan until Yellow Death was regularly crop dusted over human settlements. A new allergy for some people, a nerve gas to salarians, a rabies like virus to turians, a slow descent into madness for asari. Wholly effective against any and all comers.

What her VI provided next did what the previous material hadn’t been able to do. Instantly the temperature in the room rose a degree, the heat something that she perceived as internal in response to the black fury that swallowed her whole from the moment she had read the first line. Westerlund News was the equivalent of the unholy child of TMZ and the most offensive shock jock. Of all the reprehensible journalists and reporters who had ever lived no one deserved the early, violent death and shallow grave as much as Khalisah Bint Sinan al’Jilani. The ten thousand word propaganda piece was holding up the ORM as the saviors of humanity, that omega were baby machines and home makers who had lusted for things that were above their natural station in life and were being punished for it. The divine god had guided the hand of the scientists who had created Halcyon 251 and the only way to atone for the sins of their forbearers and be forgiven was for omega to submit to the divinely chosen alpha entirely. The ORM was trying to re-establish the natural order of things and that every omega who wished to reach paradise should willingly turn themselves into the ORM starting with Braelyn to set the proper example and that if she did perhaps she would also be forgiven for her sinful homosexual relationship with Miranda Lawson and “other women”.

The last was a stab in the dark and a baseless accusation on al’Jilani’s part, the woman was trying to stir the pot and see if anyone came forward with any information that could be twisted into another story like this one. If al’Jilani had proof she would have used names, would have used Ashley’s if she knew about it and could find a single likely instance to make the story believable. Ashley had served with too many people, too many arkies – hell the entire Eighth Fleet was comprised almost entirely of arkies with the exception of Eden Prime- and a close personal friendship between individuals of the same sex wasn’t strange. Sharing the same living space and the same bed as a close personal friend was so common place that it wouldn’t even be called into question by the vast majority of Westerlund’s subscribers.

It turned out that being pair-bonded to the single most recognizable omega in recent history had its drawbacks, like a comfortable prison cell for the rest of her natural life for the homicide that Ashley was entirely ready to commit. More to reassure herself than anything else Ashley curled herself tighter around her omega, the growl she hadn’t been aware of growing louder with each line she read until she was almost foaming at the mouth. The public backlash was astonishing to both al’Jilani and all the people like her, particularly those parents who had turned their children over to the organization. A breaking news feed coming over the military comm nodes had revealed that in the time since she’d started reading a riot had begun in New York at the ORM headquarters and half the city was in flames.

No wonder Clayborne had all but threatened to declare war, the Hegemony would be forced to make a move to distract the population and to keep whatever manic pyromaniacs that set fire to New York from setting the whole world on fire. “Wait,” Williams blinked stupidly at the live vid of rapid rioters charging into a line of soldiers armed with sound cannons and foam guns over their fallen comrades in mayhem to fall on the armored men and women with whatever weapon they had in hand, “Are they attacking the SAAF?”

More news feeds coming in over the military comm nodes, rioting in every major city that held an SAAF base or official building down the gravity well, and an email with the enticing message line: “This is why they’re fighting >.<” from none other than Admiral Clark Hughes himself. Or someone who had hacked his email account. And then the warning siren on the base flared to life.


	9. Weightless Verse

The days following the news of the rioting down the gravity well ignited by the worse kind of whistleblowers revealing all the dirty little secrets of what the SAAF Series 3 hormones were doing to omega confirmed by an in-depth study by the unquestioned authority on the subject of omega anatomy and physiology, the Acheron Complex of Mars, passed in a colorless haze. When she’d awoken in Williams arms to find the base had locked itself down and killed the extranet after a virus had infected Admiral Hughes email and sent classified information to **_everyone_** in the SAAF she’d responded quite calmly. Retrieving a coffee mug from the rack above the coffee marker, brewing a pot of the hot delicious and composing her announcement of retirement to both Admiral Hughes and the base commander, within twenty minutes she’d had a response from both of them and promptly washed the rest of the hormones she had down the sink and turned on the garbage disposal. Effective immediately Braelyn had become a retired veteran, her jacket frozen with new awards and honors, though she was required to do a final tour to help calm the masses.

Mountains of paperwork and press conferences and ceremonies swirled together in a colorful vortex that made her nauseous as her body fought off the effects of going epi, unchained for the first time since her first day in basic training. The only thing that had kept her from going neigh catatonic in the first few hours after realizing that she was _once more_ stuck in a metal can flying through space at speeds the human brain wasn’t designed to comprehend caught in the middle of what was the most traumatic epigenetic shift she’d experienced while fully conscious had been a healthy dose of omegandorf supplied by the ‘Alliance PR department. One of the many miracle drugs developed on Mars it was all the happy chemicals the brain synthesized compressed into a flaky white Altoid sized pill fit for human consumption. It was supposedly non-habit forming according to the advertising and while Braelyn would never get the opportunity to test its effects in their entirety she was inclined to believe the hype.

The sinfully expensive little things had become something of a rich man’s drug, usurping the hold that Quaaludes had had since before the first torus had been constructed in space. The omegandorf had made the press conferences and public appearances bearable, it stopped the shakes and pushed away those horrible thoughts to a distant buzzing in the back of her skull when they’d marched her on stage to perform before the masses. It had kept her level headed when she’d visited the memorial on the newly sanitized Akuze, the atmosphere plants constructed there having killed anything more complex than a prion during the first stages of terraformation. It hadn’t, however, prevented her from collapsing back into the helpless wreck of a human in med bay as her microbiome struggled to regain equilibrium after shift.

It wasn’t a specific occurrence, in that it could be attributed to Braelyn being an omega, but more of an ability she had inherited from both her mother and her absent sire. Whoever he was he hadn’t been from the home world and likely hailed from a more scientifically liberal nation that didn’t have a problem genetically engineering its population to suit the needs of the masses. That narrowed it down to five nations based entirely on educated guesses as to what her sire’s age was but he was a red headed alpha (Ao) with either green or grey eyes capable of radical epigenetic shifts. It was a trait he had passed on to his offspring, all of which were phenotypically similar enough to be easily identified as siblings at a glance which meant that he wasn’t a chimera which all but ruled out Mars as a contender and thrust the Concordia to the most likely candidate. Red hair was uncommon anywhere else, still recessive you got strawberry blondes in places like Mars and the Cloud Ark but stark, deep, true red was reserved exclusively for the Condordia –the color specifically chosen for how noticeable it was in the lighting that was used in the earliest days of the nation when the Concodria was strictly a series of mining operations and the colonies that housed the miners.

Which was a good thing, it seemed like Mars had grown to dominate most of her life in the last two ES years. 

Braelyn had emerged from her shift ravenous, less sensitive to the sounds of the environmental systems and engines and claustrophobia which were the large characteristics of spacer living. Those born and raised on board ships were mostly from a long line of individuals with the same background, the long chains of “junk” DNA which determined what phenotypes were expressed both externally and internally permanently set to accommodate their environment. It was a change that had taken generations in some cases or heavy genetic tampering on others, a change she had effected in the nine days since she had left Eden Prime. _Going epi_ was a strange, highly useful adaptation but fairly common among the Eighth Fleet due to the sheer number of Arkies and Concord Natives capable of it. This simple wasn’t true of the First Fleet and it showed in the curious looks she had garnered from the crew of the SSV Tsunami when she had emerged a different person.

But she wasn’t truly a different person, the changes were all physiological though the difference was clearly obvious to her. That she felt lighter in the preferred 0.9 _g_ of human orbital stations and ships was clear, that she was physically stronger than the few crewmen who were of a size with her due to her time in the 1.04 _g_ of Eden Prime for the time being had garnered her looks of embarrassment and consternation in the gym. For these reasons and more she was eternally grateful when she landed in Illyria when the Tsunami had stopped for resupply.

The death grip she had on Braden was less of an embrace and more of a silent entreaty for him not to let her float away in the almost frighteningly weaker _g_ of Elysium. It’s meager 0.695 _g_ had allowed the colonist to build grand architecture here but suddenly weighing 63lbs with the knowledge that she could unintentionally jump up and hit the ceiling in a two story house was sobering. Her brother had half carried her through the customs medical evaluation where she was given a _g_ belt. More of a harness circa mountain climbing than an actual belt the padded black paracord hung from both shoulders and circled around her waist. Weights braided into the material evenly distributed an additional 37.5lbs firmly securing her to the ground. At best the belts were a temporary, low tech, solution given to anyone who was visiting for less than two weeks, if you were staying longer you got a _g_ watch which generated a weak personal mass effect field capable of generating a stable 0.9 _g_ for about ten years before it had to be replaced. The minimalist contraption was a civilian take on the true _g_ belts built into standard issue battle rattle, those were two mass effect fields that allowed soldiers to work at maximum efficiency 0.9 _g_. In the standard Onyx X operating properly soldiers could run faster and fight longer all the while expending less energy to do so.

The additional weight wasn’t uncomfortable, accustomed to pulling high _g_ over the course of her military career it wasn’t the heaviest she had ever been. A few jogged steps and jumps had acclimated her well enough to walking on Elysium with the _g_ belt so when the pair had strode out into the bright blue sunlight she wasn’t as ungainly as the few others leaving the small military port with similar equipment. As soon as they had cleared the doors leading from customs into the space port proper Braden turned and offered her a small box, “Running ten kilometers in that will be a nightmare.”

He tugged gently on the harness so she understood what he meant as she removed the lid of the box revealing a slim silver watch, higher end tech, a standard model favored by business men and wealthier travelers frequenting low _g_ worlds. “Think of it as a retirement present.”

“You didn’t have to get me anything for retiring.” Heedless of the rules that demanded that these things not happen while one of them was in uniform Braelyn threw her arms around her brother in more of a true hug than the death grip she’d had on him when he first appeared as this port’s official liaison arranged by the PR Department. Laughing he hugged her back, wrapping her up in his big arms and lifting her clear off the ground oblivious to the less than approving looks cast his way by security and their quiet muttering.

“Well put it on,” he urged, “It won’t do for you to wear forty pounds of weight every time you want to go outside while you’re here.”

Weaving in and out of foot traffic on the base Braelyn was only half paying attention to the excited rambling of her brother, far more preoccupied noting the differences between them and the other pedestrians. Their mother’s family was from the Asteroid Concordia and being among root stock humans, those whose lineage could be traced directly back to Earth in a line unbroken by genetic engineering, the difference was shockingly apparent in a way it hadn’t been on Eden Prime, a world firmly held by the Cloud Ark. As a general rule omega were smaller than either beta or alpha for the same reason that males were taller and broader with bigger hands and feet –testosterone levels during puberty. Being the smallest person in any given space wasn’t new to Braelyn but just how small she was in comparison to root stock humans was always slightly alarming.

Space favored smaller individuals due to the limited space available in artificial habitats, Braden who stood at roughly the same height as your average root stock alpha, around 6’4” was far more slender than any of them. The heavy muscle development nurtured by high levels of testosterone that was a clear marker of alpha to anyone who didn’t have the nose of an omega was evident but the difference was in build. Root stock alpha were mountains of moving muscle, football linemen, when compared to spacers, closer to MMA fighters or Olympic weight lifters. The beta she saw ranged in build from the stocker frame of alpha to the slighter frame of omega but all were taller and thicker than what you would see in a habitat.

The dichotomy between the dynamics was as clear cut and defined as the dichotomy between the sexes, the dichotomy between root stock and spacer was as clearly defined. And the hostility was there though not outright violence, the few that spared the Shepards more than a passing glance were full of the confidence that came when big men looked at smaller men and small women. The surety that if it came to blows their size would determine the outcome of the fight, as if leverage and speed meant nothing. They were men like Maddox and men like Maddox tended to discount speed and flexibility and leverage when they believe they had _both_ size and skill on their side.

Humans were so genetically closer to one another, Braelyn’s littermates were closer to her than anyone else – 50% closer, in fact- but they were still so different. Braden moved before her with the confidence of an alpha, assured that people would recognize his aura and move out of his way in deference to that and he was correct. They did. Some days a part of her hated him for that; hated Braxton for that with the same irrational intensity bordering on the psychotic that she hated Asari. It was as if he had won some genetic lottery or test that she had failed in-utero that determined her worth to the nations of Earth which so heavily influenced how root stock humans saw her.

Her only marketable skills were lost to her, to the Terran SAAF she could no longer be of service as a sniper or electronic operative due to the politics of it all. If Braden had suffered the same injuries as her, losing a leg and severe chemical burns, he wouldn’t still be benched. His payroll at the same rank would always be higher just because he was an alpha. Just because he was an alpha he didn’t look at everyone and assess how threatening they were, automatically adjust chemical pheromones to placate people in a fierce and frankly unfair instinctual manipulation – omega had mastered chemical warfare before the first civilizations had even thought of offering infected blankets or throwing dead bodies into water supplies to gain advantage. She tried to hide it from Braden, struggled with it in her weaker moments and for years he had played along pretending that he didn’t see anything. She hated being omega, there was nothing for her among the Terran nations and not for the first time she cursed her grandparents for immigrating to Earth for some unknown reason.

She had turned down Miranda Lawson offering her a chance at a life that she had for so long thought lost to her because of the negative impact it would have on the both of them, on her littermates, and on her parents all because her office had been bugged. But the offer had been entirely too good to let slip by entirely, when the news had come that someone, _read Scuttlebutt_ , had leaked the personal medical files of all the omega in the SAAF to the public there had been a mad scramble in the Brass to save face. That her name had been the only one specifically mentioned and the announcement that she had accepted an early retirement package generously offered by Admiral Hughes mere hours after the news had flooded the extranet had been an instant political firestorm. Before anyone could being applying pressure to the back of Braelyn’s metaphorical neck she had once again been contacted by one Rikard Lyon Decartia Nairn of Phoenix Enterprises formally offering her the same job Miranda had pitched to her. No more than twenty minutes later her citizenship records had been updated showing what she had expected to see Earth and the Concordia with the addition of Mars dated to six months after Akuze when Phoenix had first extended a job offer to her.

When the ORM representative had questioned this at the memorial on Akuze Braelyn had laughed in the beta’s face as he was shouted down by the assembled crowd of atmosphere plant employees, families come to honor their loved ones, and Marines come to honor the fallen. When she had managed to suppress the uncontrolled giggles, the crowd noise finally fading she had responded with the most eloquent string of words she had ever managed to stick together in front of a camera –

> _The Martian Government was established by people born and raised with the theology of the Areophany as a constant presence in their lives. For generations before the First Colonial Revolution Mars and the Asteroid Concordia became home to the repressed minorities of Earth. At first they were isolated research stations or small mining colonies that welcomed the influence of other cultures sympathetic to their own and around this their children created new cultures that allowed new ideas to prosper. In the Concordia, on Mars, aboard the Cloud Ark people are valued based on their skills sets instead of type cast into roles predetermined by outdated societal norms. When I lost my leg I knew it was only a matter of time before I was discharged and I wanted to keep my options open, per standard SAAF protocol any member of the armed forces can apply for citizenship to any nation that openly contributes to the Systems Alliance and that record is sealed until their term of service is up if they choose not to re-enlist._

She was proud of that statement, it was still running as a headline as more and more former SAAF personnel came out of the woodwork to support her choice – many of them had five or more legal citizenships. The Alliance PR team hadn’t been so enthused behind closed doors, the Martians were stealing soldiers from right beneath their noses and there was legally nothing that they could do about it. Anyone else would be subject to cloak and dagger dealings but Braelyn Shepard was highly visible and immensely skilled, every job offer had been more than generous and she had been careful not to favor any of them. Even Mr. Decartia Nairn’s offer sat in the que waiting to be formalized after she was done on Arcturus.

Elysium was just a lay over, a chance to catch up with her brother before the ship that was taking her into the very heart of the First Fleet arrived at 0550 Zulu. They collapsed onto Braden’s battered leather couch and talked about nothing in that way that only littermates could, flipping idly through public access television while waiting on some local cuisine to be delivered. Between them there was much left unsaid, that Braxton hadn’t spoken to Braden since Torfan though he remained in constant contact with Braelyn wasn’t discussed.

When he walked her back to the port in the stark darkness of Elysium’s night cycle she embraced him once more. “You’ll still keep in touch wherever you end up, right?”

Turning in the unused _g_ belt to the exhausted looking kid on the other side of the plexiglass hunched over an entire pot of coffee she smiled at Braden, “Everyday.”


	10. Intermission

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See! Five chapters! And in a few chapters there's going to be like ten new chapters that are going to be original content and not so much rewritten or editted content!

The announcement had come as a resounding shock, the concussive blast of a hell fire grenade gone off far too close for comfort the smart armor muting the sound and flash as the inferno raged around a face plate gone entirely polarized in that instant. Blind and deaf the animal mind screaming that you were endanger and helpless to do anything about it as the firefight raged all around you in that eerie quiet like the void. Alone the release of sensitive medical information to the public with the cold clinical detachment that could only be attributed to the Acheron Group even without an individual name attached to the article wouldn't have been so bad, nor would the public backlash against the frankly barbaric practices of the SAAF but then the Eighth Fleet had confirmed that Braelyn would be leaving the SAAF.

That it was a retirement with full honors and not a medical discharge contrary to the five hundred page journal released publicly crucifying any of the SAAF doctors in the back pocket of the Hegemony that claimed that the extensive suite of artificial hormones were not the cause of any devastating mental or physical issues in soldiers didn't matter. It had taken surprisingly little for the Second and Fifth Fleet to turn over blacked medical files to the Acheron Group after the Sol Consensus had launched an official investigation using the Acheron Complex as their chosen vehicle. Every Martian soldier had had their names and sensitive operational information removed from the flood of data that the quantum computers of the Acheron Complex had peeled apart with an almost religious fervor, the data relayed to the Mining Vehicle within the Asteroid Concordia to confirm their findings. While the Mining Vehicle didn’t hold the same reputation as the Acheron Complex, it’s very name indicative of such, it did hold the prestigious honor of being the greatest medical data base within the Concordia with members who had trained in the Acheron Complex.

What was found was in turn confirmed by the Cloud Ark and published for the whole of humanity’s viewing pleasure, what they found was that every SAAF soldier was suffering to some extent from the hormone treatments though omega had it the worse. The composition was all but toxic to omegas, the imbalance of their hormones clashing horribly with the hormones introduced by the suite as their body fought to rebalance the hormones. Omega produced less than a tenth of what was introduced by the suite which was entirely unnecessary given that the suites were designed to lower aggression in soldiers trapped together in close quarters in space and omegas were naturally less aggressive given that all omega, even male omega, produced less testosterone than alphas and omegas. No organization, not even the Systems Alliance, could get away with poisoning several trillion human begins and all but the First and Third Fleets had immediately used the inquiry being conducted as an excuse to phase the practice out entirely. The Hegemony’s grip lessening with every soldier that did not receive the suite.

Instead of doing the sensible thing the First and Third Fleets had launched an inquiry of their own, searching for any evidence at all that the Eighth Fleet, particularly Braelyn herself, had had anything to do with the leaked information. The brute force attack on secure military servers had left holes big enough to fly a cruiser through and had originated at over tens of thousands different locations throughout Alliance Controlled Space. Already fifteen hackers had already been taken into custody, all of them civilians, all of them associated with groups in direct opposition to the Hegemony. Only those two unfortunate men would be subject to a closed door trial but the other thirteen were looking at walking away with a slap on the wrist by their local government, local governments which were sympathetic to their cause.

The evidence was mounting against the First and Third Fleets, that all the released files had been scrubbed of all information that could be used to find the omega save for Braelyn had kicked up another firestorm. The gross violation of privacy had elicited no response from the diplomatically minded omega; her retirement had been in the works for months and had only recently been approved by the United Terran Government when it became apparent that only the First and Third Fleet’s Admiralty would argue against it. She would leave the SAAF Marine Core with full honors in three days.

What she had planned after that was a mystery, of course there was rampant speculation and rumor and false information being put out on the extranet – the most ridiculous of which claiming that she had joined the ORM and would be rallying other omega to do the same though that had been quickly discredited as Westerlund News propaganda spread by al’Jilani herself. Once he had even been approached with questions as to what his eldest daughter was up to by undercover paparazzi in a bar, the answer had been carefully thought out – the same answer he had been giving to his wife since his eldest children were pups.

> _“I may have made a grave error while raising her teaching her the finer points of poker. But then who expects a six year old to be a card shark with a poker face that even professionals would find impressive? Ever since she’s played her cards close to her chest. I have no idea what she’s up to.” Brandon, dressed in a clean neatly pressed white dress shirt and crisp blue jeans, pool cue in hand shrugged at the reporter. “The last time we talked was before she got on the transport that was bringing her here informing me that she was leaving Elysium and when she was supposed to be arriving. I’m waiting for her to tell me what she’s going to do next too.”_

While it was not the most diplomatic of anything that he’d ever said, most of his public appearances were carefully planned by the Navy PR department. The reporter had found him in a good mood and he’d told the absolute truth, the military was surely screening his inbox and they’d find out exactly what he knew – a grand total of what amounted to absolutely nothing. What the Brass knew from his inbox was that Braelyn was looking forward to Oscar Season and the movies that came with the Sundance Festival more than the summer, that she had no idea what to look for in investment opportunities, that she still consulted her father when she needed advice on CDs and IRAs and contacted him regularly just to inquire about how he was doing. A sweet child with a good head on her shoulders he was certain that if the Brass looked through Braden or Braxton’s emails they’d find equally useful personal information.

But Braelyn had always been like that, even before he had taught her how to play poker, she had played cards close to her chest, she kept her own council and had learned just how advantageous that course of action was. Teaching her poker had only given her a vehicle through which she had won all of her littermates allowance in long games of poker held when they believed that he and Hannah had gone to bed. That tendency had immediately differentiated her from her littermates and made his little duckling a force to be reckoned with even at the tender age of four.

Of course the extranet had gone wild with theories and rumors as the offers pouring in from the public sector had increased dramatically since her departure from Eden Prime. But Braelyn had remained stubbornly tight lipped, the only confirmed information being that she had turned down Miranda Lawson's offer very early in the game. 

Lawson herself had stated that it was for the best and that Braelyn would have no trouble finding a job that suited her much better than the manufacturing of medical supplies and implants. That the offer was still on the table went entirely unspoken and unnoticed by the media at large, that the two of them were genuinely good friends even though the galaxy was convinced that Lawson’s reasoning had been purely selfish in the beginning. He himself had been suspicious at first but he’d seen them behind closed doors, Lawson had inherited the ability to rub people the wrong way from that madman of a father of hers.

Spurred on by that statement the extranet junkies who had nothing better to do with their spare time than speculate on the lives of others instead of living their own speculation had run rampant. Whatever he had expected when his duckling landed on Arcturus he wasn't sure but it was far from what he'd gotten. All of the public appearances she had had since departing Eden Prime had been carefully constructed, an elaborate show like a Broadway production, all the footage of her in those instances included a heavily armed honor guard of some of the toughest looking Marines he had ever seen pushing back journalists and reporters. Any other footage showed her in transit, usually taken from a distance with Braelyn in fatigues with a duffle bag slung haphazardly over her shoulder coming or going from the designated military port when the ship she had taken did not dock at the base itself. 

She seemed lighter, unencumbered by the weight of hormones raging through her veins as she hotfooted it out of the way of the navy personnel servicing SSV Typhoon like every other marine on shore leave. Abruptly she was wrapped in his arms, crushed to his chest in a manner that was only appropriate when greeting family after a long tour of duty. There was no scent beneath hers, nothing astringent leaking from her pores that would signal something unpleasant in her system. Instead the only artificial scent he picked up from her was the blue bar of anti-bacterial soap issued to live aboard.

"Hi, daddy." her voice was strong and sure and excited but reserved in a way that was the cadence used by people who were used to be watched, recorded, analyzed. As if she was expecting her words to be scrutinized as closely as any action taken though the press were not allowed in SAAF hangers and the marines clustered around them were just as preoccupied with their own families or pushing past the crush of bodies further into the station proper.

A low rumbling purr trembled out of his chest, the vanilla and amber and old book scent of his pup triggering the pleasant memories of the days before she'd run off to the Concordia to join the SAAF. Of the time when his pups were young, clustered in between himself and Hannah during thunder storms, curled up on together on the carpet in front of the television in the den, before Massani had come back out of the fog, before Hackett had moved them from London. 

"Hello, duckling." Timothy slung her bag over his shoulder, turning to guide her through the hanger complex and out into the station proper though she knew the way just as surely as he did. Every marine could navigate through Arcturus Station with as much ease as they could on any military station, large and grander Arcturus had the same basic construction. Easy to defend and an almost insurmountable fortress to take from the inside.

Arcturus Station was not home, a cold utilitarian place that fit people into cubby holes, the SAAF treating families like an unwanted nuisance. If the SAAF wanted its soldiers to have families they would issue mates and authorize each pup in each litter with a set amount of them based on pay grade and importance. His own life a perfect representation of how Hackett would run the lives of all the grunts of the First Fleet if given the opportunity, all of it except Hannah and her pups. If Hackett had had the power to make it happen Hannah and her pups would have been put to death for Massani’s crimes and desertion.

Zaeed Massani had been a charming young man in his youth, a battle hardened soldier with a jacket full of impressive medals and commendations he had been on a fast track to the admiralty and Hannah had been enchanted by him. Liberal, loud, passionate, violent but gentle when it counted Zaeed had been her first love, the sire of her first litter, but that _sigma_ was not who she had thought that he was but hadn’t listened to Brandon when he’d tried to tell her the truth.

The truth was that Zaeed Massani was a mechanic, a man who fixed other men, a man who had a talent for making powerful enemies and leaving blood baths in his wake. A man who had been plucked from a maximum security prison under the condition that he would have a stay of execution if he became the Marine’s dog. It was only a matter of time before he had gotten ghost in the Terminus Systems, reconnecting with his old gang the Blue Suns effectively putting himself out of Hackett’s reach. With his favorite pitbull turned traitor the man beneath the mask of the young admiral had thought to strike back at a man without a heart but hadn’t been presented with the opportunity until Hannah turned up pregnant.

For his own reasons, for his love for Hannah, he would’ve done anything for her but something had unwound in his chest when he’d first seen the three tiny pups behind the glass of the maternity ward. From the very look of them it was apparent that they were not his by blood, all three of them with flaming red hair from the word go, but his name was the one on their birth certificates. And Hackett could do nothing to them, nothing to Hannah, and so his only choice was to advance and dictate the outcome of Brandon’s career. A paper cut out of a man, a puppet that he could manipulate as he wanted.

It was a small price to pay for three smiling pups, two brash young alphas who cared nothing for his position as head of the household and a sweet little omega who sat curled up in his lap in the evenings while her littermates wrestled on the floor. He had been distant with his sons though not for the reasons that the boys must have thought, that it was because he wasn’t their sire. In truth Brandon was at Hackett’s beck and call, familial relationships meant less than nothing to that man, he hadn’t had the time he should have to build a relationship with his sons. So he had raised them with the same way his own father had raised him.

Braden and Braxton were alphas, they weren’t as delicate as omega, they weren’t a sensitive to social cues, weren’t as gifted naturally at social engineering. The alpha didn’t require as much direct guidance and direction in early childhood, indirect methods had to be taken. Brandon had done the same to the pups of the other two litters he and Hannah had produced. All of his children were held at a distance except Braelyn, his only omega. Omega were highly social, the center of complex scent based socio-sexual hierarchies that bridged the schism between litters formed by the proximity of age. Bonded strongly to each of her siblings, to himself and her mother, she was what held her littermates close to her.

Not for the first time he wished that things were different, that he had raised his children with more attention and care than he himself had been raised despite Hackett’s interference. Braden had become the strictest definition of control, that impossible summit that all alphas strived to achieve – a war hero and natural leader. Braxton had become the antithesis of his brother, a raging monster that had systematically butchered two hundred batarian slavers long before he had officially become the Butcher of Torfon. And Braelyn had broken, had tried to be a beta and broken herself. Though perhaps the greatest failure, his only true failure, was Gabriel.

Gabriel was the ultimate price that Hackett had taken from him, the kind of creature that Hackett liked, a man who would give up anything to furthering their own agenda tailored by Hackett himself. A fracture in the Shepard household and wound in Brandon’s heart, Gabriel who wanted nothing more than to ruin Brandon’s name in exchange for whatever paltry fortune Hackett had promised him. So effectively had Gabriel torn apart the family, the only thing that held the Shepard family together as a whole was their surname and his rebellious alpha offspring was to blame. The quiet reservation to family reunions like this, the greetings stilted – an exchange of crisp handshakes before what little personal belongings Braelyn had accumulated in the last eight years were loaded into the back of the skycar.

Something unpleasant in Gabriel’s grey eyes as he watched Braelyn, something unpleasant and hungry.

The ride was long, uncomfortable, full of long pauses following attempted conversation starts as his children danced around one another. It gave him the chance to be introspective, to marvel at the differences between his children. That maybe he should have done better by then.


	11. Weightless Verse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I have this thing about writing. All of my first drafts are written with pencil and paper and then at a later date are typed, editted, and posted. Here's my problem... I hate the actual process of typing out anything. About two hundred words into any given chapter I get frustrated and start truly hating what I'm doing so I stop. Does anyone else have this problem? Because it's unbelievable frustrating... like the CSR 2 Racing daily in the Bentley Continental. I HATE this race. I've been stuck on it for like two days.

When a dog is rabid, lashing out and attacking any who come too near or any it believes weaker than itself, there is no question that you kill it. When a man is rabid, lashing out and attacking any who come too near him or any whom he believes is weaker than himself, there is no question and you kill him. That is the logic applied to the fringe colonies in the distant Terminus Systems, the logic under which she had operated for so many years it had become second nature. That she knew the man was of no consequence, that he would have been one of her intimates was of no consequence, and in that moment as he stared into the face of death she knew that he understood this. That she would kill him and feel nothing, that to her he was just another rabid dog to be put down, a feral creature masquerading in human clothing. 

To his credit his survival instincts were far keener than his intelligence, three years sitting at a desk had not changed her from the marine that she had been prior to Akuze and free of the chains of hormones she was far more dangerous now than she had ever been. He lay limp beneath her weight on the floor, eyes wide with pain and shiny with panic and the knowledge that the slightest twitch would result in his life blood set loose to stain the carpet beneath them even more. Or perhaps it was disbelief. No man like him had the moxie to select, for their first victim, someone they knew had the potential to be dangerous and came armed with only a collapsible club. 

His weapon lay uselessly beyond the reach of his right hand, sliced neatly in half along with the remains of ring and pinky finger. Perhaps this had been the first time that he had felt real pain, raw and unfiltered by drugs or neural passageway blocks –Arken was good for disabling those kinds of things. He had screamed when he lost his fingers, the shriek of the dying, a sound of primal fear and pain and rage that had died on his lips with the knife had come around again and so neatly sliced through the rotator cuff of his left arm. The knife had come down again, severing his right bicep as she’d ridden him down to the ground. 

The KPX Model 9 was not a weapon that was designed to be used to disable opponents in close encounters, the “can opener” as it was affectionately referred to by many a marine and seamen alike was a boarding knife designed to cleave through boarding armor. As in the past, the most dangerous aspect of ship to ship combat was when a vessel was boarded by the enemy. Armor and weapons became better and better until, at last humanity had come up with the KPX Model 9 in some fever dream fueled by 1970s cinema and plasma cutters. 

The blade itself was a wickedly sharp alloy that rarely was used against opponents in full battle rattle but was among one of the best you could find in a combat knife hence the popularity of the civilian model, KPX Model 8, but the devil was in the cartridge at the hilt. As long as a grown man’s forearm from tip to pommel the single edge of the knife had a neat, narrow groove bifurcating the edge in which a secondary edge was housed. A fraction of a millimeter in thickness when extended a line of highly charged particles super cooled that sliver of painstakingly crafted and viciously trademarked alloy reached almost unbelievable temperatures. Whatever it came into contact with grew rigid and brittle with the cold and shattered allowing the wickedly sharp true edge of the knife to reach vital internal organs. 

What that sliver could do to a human body was nothing short of horrifying to witness, an indescribable experience to whichever unfortunate soul was on the receiving end. But for all that he was, this man was her brother in name if nothing else so she had only used the true cutting edge. The resistance the bones of his fingers had offered like cutting through a few sheets of construction paper sheets with scissors. The delicate bones of his cervical vertebrae wouldn’t offer even that much. Blood beaded around the blackened metal where it pressed to his throat, the cut so clean that it was unlikely he would feel it until after the knife had been removed. 

“Shallow breaths now Gabriel, it’d be unfortunate if you cut your own throat.” He’d come to her when he thought that she’d be asleep, exhausted by her time spent in transit as her internal rhythm adjusted to Arcturus. 

How little he understood about the men of the First Fleet, a shame that he didn’t understand that he wasn’t the only dog that Hackett had trained to use their teeth, men known for this kind of thing and moved from duty station to duty station to avoid punishment. Men gone too far down the same road Maddox was following, men whose violent ends no captain would lament either because of moral values or because of their stupidity in getting caught and weakness for being killed; men who had a tendency of disappearing anywhere that wasn’t the First Fleet or succumbing to PTSD and throwing themselves out of air locks. Accidents happened, some people just couldn’t adjust to life onboard ships, the symptoms too varied to discern until it was too late. 

No one mourned their passing. 

In his eyes she saw him scrambling for an excuse, a way to turn this around on her and win sympathy from their mother and father – a true born son of the couple while she was someone else’s bastard. For more years than he had known what to do with his cock other than relieve his bladder she had been dealing with men like him. For more years than he had been alive she had been with their father, every day their bond growing stronger and stronger. Their father KNEW her, at her best and at her worst, and for Gabriel the same could not be said. 

The frankly horrible decryption software he had used on his VI succumbed quickly to Arken’s subtle probing, the Ghost Programs that she had spent so many hours modifying whispering through his omni-tool and the uplink it was holding with the processor block back in his room. He thought that he had been fast enough, that she’d been too high on adrenaline and the moment, that Arken would try a brute force attack to gain access to his omni-tool. But it was too late, she had root, she was a super user and all of his dirty little secrets were hers to do what she wished with. 

And what she wished was that their father knew exactly what his youngest son had been up to, for the police to know what this delinquent had been up to, and for the civilian and military news networks aboard Arcturus to know what he’d been up to. The spill was too wide, too much of a mess for Hackett to contain and too much for him to dare get involved with. Gabriel was on his own, his terrified victims now given a voice they didn’t have to worry would be stifled. There would be justice and, likely, another inmate in the Crucible. 

That had been her suggestion to the commanding officers of the military police station on Arcturus. 

“Tell me, little brother. Is it the helplessness of your victims or the pain you inflict on them that gets you off?” the fire in his eyes flared, face reddening with rage this time, not pain. “Ah, none of that.” Just a fraction more pressure on the blade and that fire died instantly, the blood from his neck now flowing slowly down to join the ever growing stain on the carpet. “Blink once for yes, twice for no.” 

The carpet was just going to have to be replaced at this rate; his blood had likely soaked all the way through by now. _“How much peroxide do we have?”_

Arken was moving faster now, peeling through Gabriel’s extranet access and discovering increasingly disturbing trends. Following back the lines of data to his sick friends, peeling back the truth cutting through an onion, all the way back to where she had quickly begun to suspect it had all begun. With the ORM and their anachronistic, sexist, misogynistic views on how the world should be run and by extension how all of human societies should be run. Boots on the hardwood stairs running, coming closer with the scent of infuriated alpha choking them both. 

“We’ll just have to put a pin in this, won’t we?” Braelyn eased back the knife just enough to slap him hard on the left cheek twice the same way you’d pat a pup’s head when they accomplished something in a way that was particularly clever, as her door all but exploded inward with the force of two hundred pounds of alpha lost in his protective instincts. 

Gabriel’s grey eyes flickered to their father’s face for just a moment, all the hope in the world shining in them before dying, withering away like the last light of the day falling quickly beyond the horizon on Eden Prime. And then he looked up at her with so much hate in his eyes it would have been terrifying to witness had she not been looking at Kelsey in the moments before he had died. Looking at Kelsey as he had been washed away in a spray of acid even as he unloaded everything that the Bullhead had had in its mounted .50 caliber turret, even as he had done what he could to draw the thresher maw away from the injured marines in the three Mako that had been hit. He had died as a marine should, with honor and bravery to defend his fellow soldiers and friends. Soldiers are trained to do a lot of things but leaving a comrade injured on the battlefield, leaving a comrade dead on the battlefield was not one of them. 

But Gabriel didn’t know this, couldn’t know this. 

He hadn’t known that as he crept up on her intending her to be victim thirty-four, the one that his friends would watch and share across the extranet as proof that even the most well respected and well known omega in this day and age was still a weak bitch, that she was awake. The footsteps he thought so carefully muffled on the hardwood outside her door as loud as a gunshot, rousing her from the light doze that had replaced sleep since leaving her nest on Eden Prime into full alertness. A slow careful movement removing the KPX from its sheath beneath her pillow as she lay in wait for the threat that her body had alerted her to. 

It could have been another one of her siblings, Glenn or Garrett, up to use the bathroom but when her door knob had started to turn she’d known instantly. Perhaps father would have done the same, opening the door to check on her as he had so many times as she had grown up but father would have spoken, would have known that she was awake. Father would have projected his scent outwards before he had reached her door, the long moments that he spent outside her door filled with the scent of wood smoke and tobacco instead of the sour stink of cruel excitement. 

He had made a grave mistake when approaching her, perhaps if he had taken the time to see anything but her sleeping peacefully, seemingly oblivious of the world around her motionless and limp in what he assumed to be REM, he would have noticed that she was quite deliberately on her left side. Would have noticed that her left arm was beneath her pillow and that her right was laying curled in a loose fist close to her chest. Would have remembered that only she and their mother were left handed of all the eight Shepards, would have remembered that all of his victims who had fought has swung with their left hands first and hardest. 

But no one had ever accused Gabriel of being smart or particularly observant. He had, after all, live streamed his attack. 

As he had loomed over her, poised to strike the blow meant to both awaken and stagger her she’d launched herself at him lasting out with a solid blow to his solar plexus. It wasn’t the kind of punch that would have dropped anyone who had been prepared for the possibility of a fight, not nearly the strength that she could deliver while standing and twisting her hips to deliver as much power as she could. But three years on a planet with a higher _g_ than Earth before travelling to a station that kept their civilian quadrants at a steady 0.9 _g_ had its benefits. 

Fortunately Gabriel had learned something about hand to hand combat and swung the club down in an attempt to buy himself space to recover. The parry was deliberate; a short swift horizontal cut that took his fingers off along with a large portion of the handle of the club. The only reason that he had any fingers on his hand was because she had launched himself at his chest, the knife redirected to his left arm and his desperate swipe. His bicep neatly severed by the KPX Model 9. 

Her knee digging into his solar plexus and the knife at his neck had been enough to keep him still before, now he began to squirm. The harsh acrid burning scent of their enraged father howling at the primitive in him to do something; the reptile brain screaming fight or run overpowering the knowledge that he couldn’t do either. In a straight up fight Gabriel would have been more than a match for his littermates, cowed as they were by his torment for near two decades, he couldn’t win against a marine. Not one who had seen real combat, not when he hadn’t snuck up on them and landed a low blow. 

He couldn’t win a fight against Braelyn when he had had the advantage, if Gabriel had chosen another weapon like a stun gun she might have been slowed enough for him to do some damage. But Gabriel was a man who thrived on violence so a blunt force weapon was right up his alley. He couldn’t win a fight against their father who had ridden a desk for almost thirty-five years even if Gabriel hadn’t lost his fingers. But he could squirm, could slit his throat with her knife in a desperate attempt to save himself from the very real living hell he would soon be thrown into. 

But of course she didn’t give him the satisfaction, he had more than earned this punishment. 


	12. Weightless Verse

When a dog is rabid, lashing out and attacking any who come too near or any it believes weaker than itself, there is no question that you kill it. When a man is rabid, lashing out and attacking any who come too near him or any whom he believes is weaker than himself, there is no question and you kill him. That is the logic applied to the fringe colonies in the distant Terminus Systems, the logic under which she had operated for so many years it had become second nature. That she knew the man was of no consequence, that he would have been one of her intimates was of no consequence, and in that moment as he stared into the face of death she knew that he understood this. That she would kill him and feel nothing, that to her he was just another rabid dog to be put down, a feral creature masquerading in human clothing. 

To his credit his survival instincts were far keener than his intelligence, three years sitting at a desk had not changed her from the marine that she had been prior to Akuze and free of the chains of hormones she was far more dangerous now than she had ever been. He lay limp beneath her weight on the floor, eyes wide with pain and shiny with panic and the knowledge that the slightest twitch would result in his life blood set loose to stain the carpet beneath them even more. Or perhaps it was disbelief. No man like him had the moxie to select, for their first victim, someone they knew had the potential to be dangerous and came armed with only a collapsible club. 

His weapon lay uselessly beyond the reach of his right hand, sliced neatly in half along with the remains of ring and pinky finger. Perhaps this had been the first time that he had felt real pain, raw and unfiltered by drugs or neural passageway blocks –Arken was good for disabling those kinds of things. He had screamed when he lost his fingers, the shriek of the dying, a sound of primal fear and pain and rage that had died on his lips with the knife had come around again and so neatly sliced through the rotator cuff of his left arm. The knife had come down again, severing his right bicep as she’d ridden him down to the ground. 

The KPX Model 9 was not a weapon that was designed to be used to disable opponents in close encounters, the “can opener” as it was affectionately referred to by many a marine and seamen alike was a boarding knife designed to cleave through boarding armor. As in the past, the most dangerous aspect of ship to ship combat was when a vessel was boarded by the enemy. Armor and weapons became better and better until, at last humanity had come up with the KPX Model 9 in some fever dream fueled by 1970s cinema and plasma cutters. 

The blade itself was a wickedly sharp alloy that rarely was used against opponents in full battle rattle but was among one of the best you could find in a combat knife hence the popularity of the civilian model, KPX Model 8, but the devil was in the cartridge at the hilt. As long as a grown man’s forearm from tip to pommel the single edge of the knife had a neat, narrow groove bifurcating the edge in which a secondary edge was housed. A fraction of a millimeter in thickness when extended a line of highly charged particles super cooled that sliver of painstakingly crafted and viciously trademarked alloy reached almost unbelievable temperatures. Whatever it came into contact with grew rigid and brittle with the cold and shattered allowing the wickedly sharp true edge of the knife to reach vital internal organs. 

What that sliver could do to a human body was nothing short of horrifying to witness, an indescribable experience to whichever unfortunate soul was on the receiving end. But for all that he was, this man was her brother in name if nothing else so she had only used the true cutting edge. The resistance the bones of his fingers had offered like cutting through a few sheets of construction paper sheets with scissors. The delicate bones of his cervical vertebrae wouldn’t offer even that much. Blood beaded around the blackened metal where it pressed to his throat, the cut so clean that it was unlikely he would feel it until after the knife had been removed. 

“Shallow breaths now Gabriel, it’d be unfortunate if you cut your own throat.” He’d come to her when he thought that she’d be asleep, exhausted by her time spent in transit as her internal rhythm adjusted to Arcturus. 

How little he understood about the men of the First Fleet, a shame that he didn’t understand that he wasn’t the only dog that Hackett had trained to use their teeth, men known for this kind of thing and moved from duty station to duty station to avoid punishment. Men done too far down the same road Maddox was following, men whose violent ends no captain would lament either because of moral values or because of their stupidity in getting caught and weakness for being killed; men who had a tendency of disappearing anywhere that wasn’t the First Fleet or succumbing to PTSD and throwing themselves out of air locks. Accidents happened, some people just couldn’t adjust to life onboard ships, the symptoms too varied to discern until it was too late. 

No one mourned their passing. 

In his eyes she saw him scrambling for an excuse, a way to turn this around on her and win sympathy from their mother and father – a true born son of the couple while she was someone else’s bastard. For more years than he had known what to do with his cock other than relieve his bladder she had been dealing with men like him. For more years than he had been alive she had been with their father, every day their bond growing stronger and stronger. Their father KNEW her, at her best and at her worst, and for Gabriel the same could not be said. 

The frankly horrible decryption software he had used on his VI succumbed quickly to Arken’s subtle probing, the Ghost Programs that she had spent so many hours modifying whispering through his omni-tool and the uplink it was holding with the processor block back in his room. He thought that he had been fast enough, that she’d been too high on adrenaline and the moment, that Arken would try a brute force attack to gain access to his omni-tool. But it was too late, she had root, she was a super user and all of his dirty little secrets were hers to do what she wished with. 

And what she wished was that he father knew exactly what his youngest son had been up to, for the police to know what this delinquent had been up to, and for the civilian and military news networks aboard Arcturus to know what he’d been up to. The spill was too wide, too much of a mess for Hackett to contain and too much for him to dare get involved with. Gabriel was on his own, his terrified victims now given a voice they didn’t have to worry would be stifled. There would be justice and, likely, another inmate in the Crucible. 

That had been her suggestion to the commanding officers of the military police station on Arcturus. 

“Tell me, little brother. Is it the helplessness of your victims or the pain you inflict on them that gets you off?” the fire in his eyes flared, face reddening with rage this time, not pain. “Ah, none of that.” Just a fraction more pressure on the blade and that fire died instantly, the blood from his neck now flowing slowly down to join the ever growing stain on the carpet. “Blink once for yes, twice for no.” 

The carpet was just going to have to be replaced at this rate; his blood had likely soaked all the way through by now. _“How much peroxide do we have?”_

Arken was moving faster now, peeling through Gabriel’s extranet access and discovering increasingly disturbing trends. Following back the lines of data to his sick friends, peeling back the truth cutting through an onion, all the way back to where she had quickly begun to suspect it had all begun. With the ORM and their anachronistic, sexist, misogynistic views on how the world should be run and by extension how all of human societies should be run. Boots on the hardwood stairs running, coming closer with the scent of infuriated alpha choking them both. 

“We’ll just have to put a pin in this, won’t we?” Braelyn eased back the knife just enough to slap him hard on the left cheek twice the same way you’d pat a pup’s head when they accomplished something in a way that was particularly clever, as her door all but exploded inward with the force of two hundred pounds of alpha lost in his protective instincts. 

Gabriel’s grey eyes flickered to their father’s face for just a moment, all the hope in the world shining in them before dying, withering away like the last light of the day falling quickly beyond the horizon on Eden Prime. And then he looked up at her with so much hate in his eyes it would have been terrifying to witness had she not been looking at Kelsey in the moments before he had died. Looking at Kelsey as he had been washed away in a spray of acid even as he unloaded everything that the Bullhead had had in its mounted .50 caliber turret, even as he had done what he could to draw the thresher maw away from the injured marines in the three Mako that had been hit. He had died as a marine should, with honor and bravery to defend his fellow soldiers and friends. Soldiers are trained to do a lot of things but leaving a comrade injured on the battlefield, leaving a comrade dead on the battlefield was not one of them. 

But Gabriel didn’t know this, couldn’t know this. 

He hadn’t known that as he crept up on her intending her to be victim thirty-four, the one that his friends would watch and share across the extranet as proof that even the most well respected and well known omega in this day and age was still a weak bitch, that she was awake. The footsteps he thought so carefully muffled on the hardwood outside her door as loud as a gunshot, rousing her from the light doze that had replaced sleep since leaving her nest on Eden Prime into full alertness. A slow careful movement removing the KPX from its sheath beneath her pillow as she lay in wait for the threat that her body had alerted her to. 

It could have been another one of her siblings, Glenn or Garrett, up to use the bathroom but when her door knob had started to turn she’d known instantly. Perhaps father would have done the same, opening the door to check on her as he had so many times as she had grown up but father would have spoken, would have known that she was awake. Father would have projected his scent outwards before he had reached her door, the long moments that he spent outside her door filled with the scent of wood smoke and tobacco instead of the sour stink of cruel excitement. 

He had made a grave mistake when approaching her, perhaps if he had taken the time to see anything but her sleeping peacefully, seemingly oblivious of the world around her motionless and limp in what he assumed to be REM, he would have noticed that she was quite deliberately on her left side. Would have noticed that her left arm was beneath her pillow and that her right was laying curled in a loose fist close to her chest. Would have remembered that only she and their mother were left handed of all the eight Shepards, would have remembered that all of his victims who had fought has swung with their left hands first and hardest. 

But no one had ever accused Gabriel of being smart or particularly observant. He had, after all, live streamed his attack. 

As he had loomed over her, poised to strike the blow meant to both awaken and stagger her she’d launched herself at him lasting out with a solid blow to his solar plexus. It wasn’t the kind of punch that would have dropped anyone who had been prepared for the possibility of a fight, not nearly the strength that she could deliver while standing and twisting her hips to deliver as much power as she could. But three years on a planet with a higher _g_ than Earth before travelling to a station that kept their civilian quadrants at a steady 0.9 _g_ had its benefits. 

Fortunately Gabriel had learned something about hand to hand combat and swung the club down in an attempt to buy himself space to recover. The parry was deliberate; a short swift horizontal cut that took his fingers off along with a large portion of the handle of the club. The only reason that he had any fingers on his hand was because she had launched himself at his chest, the knife redirected to his left arm and his desperate swipe. His bicep neatly severed by the KPX Model 9. 

Her knee digging into his solar plexus and the knife at his neck had been enough to keep him still before, now he began to squirm. The harsh acrid burning scent of their enraged father howling at the primitive in him to do something; the reptile brain screaming fight or run overpowering the knowledge that he couldn’t do either. In a straight up fight Gabriel would have been more than a match for his littermates, cowed as they were by his torment for near two decades, he couldn’t win against a marine. Not one who had seen real combat, not when he hadn’t snuck up on them and landed a low blow. 

He couldn’t win a fight against Braelyn when he had had the advantage, if Gabriel had chosen another weapon like a stun gun she might have been slowed enough for him to do some damage. But Gabriel was a man who thrived on violence so a blunt force weapon was right up his alley. He couldn’t win a fight against their father who had ridden a desk for almost thirty-five years even if Gabriel hadn’t lost his fingers. But he could squirm, could slit his throat with her knife in a desperate attempt to save himself from the very real living hell he would soon be thrown into. 

But of course she didn’t give him the satisfaction, he had more than earned this punishment. 


	13. Weightless Bridge

Understanding wasn’t a requirement, agreement wasn’t a requirement, sympathy wasn’t a requirement.

All that was required was obedience, absolute and unwavering to a cause that was greater than yourself.

All that was required was the understanding that once a target was marked the mission didn’t end until the target had been silenced.

All that was required was the acknowledgement that failure was not an option.

All that was required as that you continued the mission until the target had been silenced or you had.

It was a simple method of operating, one that appealed to the piece of them that had never gone away no matter how much rehabilitation and therapy and yoga the Organization had subjected them to. The animal hadn’t disappeared, it had just been pushed into a deep corner of their subconscious, broken to their will, now theirs to command and unleash at their leisure when the situation demanded. And the situation would eventually demand it. It was why the Organization had chosen them in particular, why the Laughing Man had strode through the kennels and stopped in front of them and paid all that money in cash up front to take them that day. When the bastard had handed the leash over the Laughing Man had become their new owner, their new master, and molded them accordingly.

To their mind it hadn’t made sense, why the Laughing Man had taken the time to establish himself in that underworld only to tear it down. Ripping the pound down off of the pillars heedless of the consequences for his actions. The Laughing Man hadn’t cared and hadn’t cared to explain it to them. The Laughing Man had said there was no point in explaining the reasons to an animal because an animal couldn’t understand the mind of a human.

Where the Bastard would have laughed then, laughed as he beat them, the Bastard had thrown them into a Crucible. The days of training to exhaustion and beyond, being beaten until they showed no pain and came back at the whip or cane with ferocity and rage until they couldn’t move and lay snarling helplessly at the Bastard until finally he threw them back into their kennel to rest on the cold cement were gone. Replaced by days of training far more brutal training, hours and hours of formal martial arts lessons and intensive weightlifting routines three days a week, hours and hours of therapy and meditation, hours and hours of sitting at a cramped desk feeling miserable with the knowledge that the youngest of school aged children could perform those simple math problems or translate those simple words. They had been drilled in language, arts, sciences and mathematics as rigorously as they had been drilled in the bastard kickboxing styles favored by spacers.

For years they had lived in the Facility beneath the tutelage of the Laughing Man until at last, with their mind expanded and filled with the knowledge that a human would have and the ability to convey that knowledge they had asked the Laughing Man again. Why had be bothered embedding himself in that shadowy group when he could have, and now they well knew just how well he could have, just kicked the door in and killed them all. He had just looked at them then, looked at them long and hard with the steely grey gaze that they had come to both fear and hate as much as they had the lash and the whip and the cane and answered. The Bastard had belonged to an organization of men who were too well protected by anonymity, my wealth and power to be dismantled with just force alone. There had to be evidence, irrefutable evidence of their actions to present to the public so that hiding behind wealth and power was no longer an option.

That had been the turning point, the point where the Laughing Man had seen them as a human and not as an animal. So when he had asked them if they would help him do the same, they had said yes.

To some it might have seemed like they had traded one group of bastards for a self-righteous group of bastards who believed that they were doing the right thing though the Laughing Man had done to them to the same things that the Bastard had. Purchasing them like a pet, training them to fight and obey. But here there was a choice, not a perceived choice but a real choice. If they had said no the Organization would have found them a home, found them a job and left them be beyond quiet observation to see how well they were adapting to their new life. They’d seen what happened when one of the other children said no, observed without overtly observing the actions taken to watch over the girl without directly interfering.

They had seen how the Organization treated the other children, those who hadn’t been pulled from kennels, and those children hadn’t been worked to exhaustion every three days alone with a Handler. Those children had been allowed to play with one another, been involved in group activities that the kennel children hadn’t been allowed to participate in until they’d proven themselves trustworthy enough not to harm the other children. Afternoons of kickball and soccer, obstacle courses and tetherball and dodgeball and the most basic of physical requirements and the most basic of self-defense courses. When they had asked the Laughing Man why the kennel children were treated differently at first he’d answered, he had told them that the kennel children were used to being treated differently and that the shock of the change in environment coupled with the sudden unnecessary demand that they maintain peek physical condition had proved to have devastating consequences in the past. He had let them watch old footage of what happened and agreed with him, agreed with the Organization.

But they weren’t foolish enough to believe that the Organization was some benevolent entity out for the betterment of mankind, that they did help people was only an unintended consequence of their actions. The Organization’s ideology and methodology rooted in the pseudo-religious philosophies that dominated the consciousness of Mars and made it what it was. The Laws of Mars were clear but unwritten, independent from the laws on the books that created guidelines for the public to follow; everything was for the betterment of the Sol Consensus and through the Sol Consensus the betterment of Mars. By definition anything to the detriment of the home world’s ruling body was to the benefit of the Sol Consensus. Earth and the Sol Consensus were still at war, it was a cold war where the opening shots had not been yet fired –the beginnings of open violence stayed temporarily by the appearance of the Batarians and humanity’s subsequent enslavement- but war was war.

Which was in part why the Organization had turned its attention to the Omega Recovery Movement.

Omega were an intrinsic part of Spacer life, deeply engrained in the history of every space born nation from the Big Three to the newest colonies declaring independence from the Homeworld and joining the Sol Consensus. Omega **were** the Sol Consensus.

Back before the genetic modification suites were offered to everyone humanity had suffered from its baser nature, its instincts hidden only by the thin veneer of civility that had served as both the reason why human societies had functioned however crudely and why the Citadel Council had refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of their suffering at the hands of the Batarians. Temper could run high between friends and being trapped in a space station with very little in the way of open space, no sky or organic day-night cycle, and carefully rationed supplies alphas weren’t likely to get jobs in the large transnational companies off world in the days when transnational companies had dominated space. Alphas which produced an average of twice as much testosterone as betas and three times as much as omega were likely to incite conflict fueled by the lack of control, cramped living accommodations and no real outlet for all of that testosterone. That had been why omega had come to dominate space, why omega were the first choice of skilled laborers, scientists, and colonists in the beginning. In space the omega population had boomed until technological advances only possible due to the discovery of the Martian Archives made living in space more bearable.

There was a time when _all_ spacers carried the recessive ‘ _o_ ’ gene, the time before the drastic measures taken to combat the Batarians –all xenocs really- had resulted in nearly 4 in 5 omega fetuses self-terminating in the womb. According to the census data that the Sol Consensus maintained nearly 98% of ethnic spacers still carried the ‘ _o_ ’ gene which contributed to the fact that the majority of living omega today were ethnic spacers.

According to historical data omega females had lived on average fifteen years longer than beta or alpha females and tended to have more children, though the last was debatable as not all census data available from before the 20th century could be relied upon for accuracy and that social norms and culture had to be taken into account. Omega tended to handle radiation and illness better than alpha and beta. Omega tended not to put up much of a fight in situations where alpha and beta would come out with fists swinging.

Earth was a place where despite the advancements in medical technology people were not living as long as they were expected to, where epidemics had become the norm due to the shockingly low standard of living for a great percentage of the population, where improper building regulation or lax safety culture had allowed the massive nuclear power plants that provided most of the planet’s energy had allowed radiation to spill out into low income areas. Earth was a place where omega were becoming increasingly rare and no systems were in place which allowed for the easy tracking of the ‘ _o_ ’ gene because the genetic modification suite had been struck down by the Hegemony and wasn’t readily available. Without the GMS there was no real way to keep track of the number of alpha, beta and omega in a given population because the gathered census data was filled out by individuals and sent in electronically and doctors had no real way of telling whether a baby was alpha, beta or omega at birth. Given the sheer diversity of root stock humanity it was impossible to tell at a glance whether or not someone was an omega or just small or sickly, whether or not someone was an alpha or just boisterous and spent hours in the gym.

For the Hegemony, in so many different ways, the ORM had to be a thing backed by the Hegemony itself or the already failing Earth would collapse. The problem was, of course, the anachronistic views and norms and cultures that had been allowed to fester on Earth given the freedom that space had offered. Did you want to establish a colony of fundamental Christians, of nudists, of polygamists, of scientologists, or any niche or broad group imaginable? In the beginning of human colonization of the Sol System it was possible with enough money. Whether or not the colony succeeded depended on a number of factors but it was possible. All the people who wanted some change in government policies or wanted freedom from societal problems that no one cared to address had departed the home world for space. Some had died out but a great deal many more had thrived and gone on to construct great nations which in turn colonized other places to expand their influence as well as further strengthen themselves politically, economically, and culturally.

The Hegemony needed the ORM, with conditions worsening and riots on the streets, burning cities, and food shortages members of the Hegemony found themselves on the receiving end of the ire of the people. That was the problem with life time government seats, everyone knew who was in charge and everyone knew who to blame when things went south.

But all of that wasn’t why they had agreed to take the job, they had been enamored by the little omega that had captured the attention of the galaxy at large a few years ago. With the Systems Alliance formally washing their hands of her the ORM was making moves. Fortunately for everyone the ORM wasn’t known for subtlety, the movement was broken to the highest level with individual cells acting more like street gangs than anything resembling organized groups. The ORM went where it wanted, did what it wanted and as a direct result the ORM was easy to track and break. But even that wasn’t the reason that they had agreed to this mission, the ORM was selling omega to the highest bidders. Omega kept in kennels. No one should be kept in kennels.

Understanding wasn’t a requirement, agreement wasn’t a requirement, sympathy wasn’t a requirement.

All that was required was obedience, absolute and unwavering to a cause that was greater than yourself.

All that was required was the understanding that once a target was marked the mission didn’t end until the target had been silenced.

All that was required was the acknowledgement that failure was not an option.

All that was required as that you continued the mission until the target had been silenced or you had.

They walked with an arrogant swagger, gazing at the men and women chained like dogs inside their cells, drugged into complacency and indifference. It was hard to fight back when you were too high to realize that the euphoria you were experiencing wasn’t real. These kennels were nicer, hotel rooms where they were fed regularly and free to walk about though they couldn’t leave, the reality of their captivity hidden behind locked doors for _“their own protection”_

_by smiling caretakers though clearly not all of them were aware of what the real operation was. They walked behind the one way glass carefully painted with beautiful murals meant to calm and mesmerize, the replacement for windows which otherwise would look out onto the drab New York skyline black with the fires that seem constantly aflame in places like Alphabet City and Brooklyn. The riots were getting closer and closer to uptown and instead of solving the problems that plagued the lower classes they just built the sky scrapers higher and higher to obscure the image of the burning city below._

As they walked they gazed out into the cells of the pretty prison the ORM had constructed in the guise of a fertility clinic, their omni-tool running hot and quiet in the background marking every individual that they saw, keeping a tally of the number of the omega here, prying into the weakly encrypted mainframes stored in the basement, downloading building schematics. The operation that would take the building down would take months to complete, possibly years while implants like them perused the items for sale, selecting a few to be taken back to the Organization and given new identities and new lives within the Sol Consensus far from the reach of the ORM. They didn’t know the identities of the other field operatives, they didn’t know where the other field operatives were stationed, which cells they were embroiled in, which buildings they were working to take down and that was for the best. For all they knew one or more of the three men striding with them, politely pretending to listening to the man explaining the brilliance of the set up and how untraceable it was, how unlike other similar set ups it was impervious from infiltration or external government oversights, how it was perfectly legitimate given its funding by the Hegemony and status as a protected fertility clinic.

“Do you see one that you like?” the slimy man asked, his eyes bright with greed in the low light environment behind the glass. They didn’t look away from the cell and the red haired omega sleeping within, the resemblance between the man and that legendary omega striking and clearly deliberate.

They turned steely brown eyes on the man, watching the beta shrink in on himself under the intensity of their gaze. “My tastes are…” they paused, mentally reviewing the information that their VI was feeding directly into the implant behind their eyes giving them an overlay of the wiring and pipes, “specific.” The man nodded sagely, as if he understood what they meant when they said it, “Just a glance isn’t enough to ensure that whatever merchandise I purchase is sturdy enough for what I intend.”

One of the men beside them, the ethnic Asian, laughed harshly, “I understand my friend.” They didn’t so much as glance in his direction, the man didn’t understand. “That one looks like that whore the Alliance is touting as a hero.”

The shrinking dealer seemed to swell a little in his boots, “We provide only the best.”

They smiled, a feral display of teeth that made the dealer step back uncomfortably, “Only the best.” They agreed uncomfortably. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is an introduction to Agent Nine and the beginning of the set up for a major plot point that I kind of touched on but failed to elaborate between the original Weightless and Blight Arcs. I guess we're kind of getting into the second part of the first arc now, the sub arc if that's a thing. Anyway meat and potatoes is what I'm trying to get across, we're getting into the meat and potatos of the ORM.
> 
> I'm going to try to update monthly. Try really being the operable word in the sentence because the updates here are incredibly random as to when a new chapter is being posted. I've got a lot of them written including the third main arc Affliction but I've got this weird thing about typing out something that I've already written.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is inspired by [Renegade Reinterpretations](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7170477/1/Renegade-Reinterpretations) by College Fools
> 
> For anyone who does care you can keep track of what I'm doing with the pseudonyms you can check out the entirety of team [CVRN](https://teamcvrn.wordpress.com/)
> 
> If anyone has a prompt, question, comment or concern you contact [Team CVRN](mailto:teamcvrn@yahoo.com).  
> .


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